Pros
It's a job - but it's not worth your mental health
Cons
Oh man where to start: Leaderships Acts Cowardly and Rewards Incompetence The leadership here operates by avoiding tough conversations with incompetent people. This creates an environment where everyone is burdened with more work. And even though incompetent people are known to be ineffective, they are never addressed or held accountable. This ultimately rewards ineffective people and punishes rockstars/high performers. It creates a workplace where you aren't incentivized to do good work because you know doing good work only means MORE work - but rarely does it lead to promotion or more money (more on that below). Rewarding ineffective/incompetent people impacts the entire team negatively, but no one seems to care. Lack of Financial Stability We've had a round of layoffs each year for the past 3 years . This happens at the same time that leadership is telling employees that we had double digit growth. To have growth in a year and then also have layoffs doesn't make sense. During and after layoffs - leadership attempts to downplay the fact that we haven't had a substantial new business win in over a year. Again this goes back to leadership not appropriately incentivizing top performers and refusing to get rid of folks that are dragging us down. And since that doesn't happen, financial instability is a direct result. Every year I've been here it took them 6 - 7 months to give us bonuses for the previous year. This is something that leadership downplayed and blamed on our holding company. But bonuses/merit raises are necessary incentives to motivate good work from the team. And the fact that leadership is unable to provide that in a reasonable timeframe at the same time saying we are growing doesn't make sense and demonstrates their dishonesty and incompetence. No Onboarding and Processes Are Unnecessarily Bogged Down by Confusion and Distrust There is NO onboarding at this organization. The recent reviews saying we have an onboarding process are complete lies. Leaders are often hired at levels they aren't ready for and then given no training on how to do their job effectively. I was told when I joined the team that people here were open to change and eager to do things better. That is a complete lie! I think because of all of the financial instability there is a very HIGH level of distrust amongst the team and between departments. This makes people double down on refusing to change things and push back HEAVILY on changes that are required to grow the agency. The creative leadership especially is deeply deeply resistant to change in a way that hampers the ability to scale the work and agency in a sustainable way. This is actually the first time I have experienced this level of outright hostility by creative team members when asked to do things differently or adapting new processes to sufficiently scale. But I think the hostility comes from a lack of trust and that also boils down to ineffective leadership. My recommendation is do not work here. I came here with very high hopes that this organization was small, nibble and a great place to grow - it's been the opposite. Mostly because this company has a leadership culture that doesn't contribute to growing and sustaining high performing teams. Ineffective people are allowed to stay and rewarded with less work, bonuses and merits are few/far between and other meaningful incentives to motivate good work aren't cultivated by leadership. It's honestly a complete mess. Don't work here - save yourself!