Kind leadership - Anonymous employee Reconstructing Judaism Employee Review

Great, supportive coworkers. If you're looking for a religious organization with progressive values, this is a good place to be.

Staff often did not feel supported or trusted by upper management. Little transparency around hiring/firing decisions. Limited opportunities to advance without a rabbinical degree.

- Everybody I met on the Associate level was very kind. I was confused that literally everybody else there (5-6 people) had begun working with the organization in the past two months, and I was surprised when one of the President's assistants just suddenly stopped showing up, but we eventually learned she had been fired. I assume many of the people my crop of associates were replacing had also been suddenly fired. There were other great people-- I truly enjoyed working with Rabbi Sandra Lawson-- but it appears she is no longer employed by the org. This is either a great decision on her part or a horrible decision on Reconstructing Judaism's.

- Other co-workers weren't so great. I was warned by two different people that the org's president could be mean, which I handwaved away both times. And then I saw her be very mean. I was trained in the org's arcane database process (record everything in one database and then re-record it in another) by a coworker in my department who regularly made it clear she did not like having to train anybody, especially me. - The WFH situation seemed flexible, but I was always on the clock. "Flexible" meant "anybody can email you at any time and expect a swift response. - Relatedly, the drive out of the office gets jammed up badly with traffic, so I thought it was very nice that I was allowed to leave an hour early on my days in the office. Unfortunately, and this was not communicated until I was reprimanded a couple weeks into my employment, this didn't actually mean I could stop working early. I would work all day, drive home in rotten traffic from 4-5, and then be expected to get right back onto my computer and work from 5-6. - The organization was not as progressive as I had been told in the interview process and in the org literature. Reconstructing Judaism portrayed itself as not being Zionist, but in my short time with the company, most management visited Israel. The president visited twice, which I know because I had to help her prepare for the trip after she fired her assistant. - I became the president's assistant-for-a-day a few times, in part because my supervisor did not respect my time. After I had already started my job, I found out I was doing the work two former employees had done. My supervisor defended this by noting one of those employees had been a part-timer, so I wasn't doing the work of two people, more like "1.5 jobs," but I still had a normal 40 hour workweek to do 60 hours of work, plus whatever I had to do the handful of times I became the president's temporary assistant. As rough as the president was, I truly felt hurt that my supervisor didn't help me navigate any of this. The person who could potentially help train me, define my schedule and what I was spending my time on, give me basic information on how to even operate some of the software or reach some of the people she wanted me to reach, didn't do any of that. Here's the best example of her disregard for me as a person. I grew to expect the disregard for me as an employee, but one day, as I was working in the office, I made a mistake in an email to management, writing the wrong number in a note about the donations we had received that day. The number was completely off-- I don't remember exactly what it was, but it was a stupid mistake on my part. I received an email from her, pointing the mistake out and I sent a follow-up email to management sincerely apologizing for the error. Later that day, my supervisor emailed that she wanted me to have a meeting at the end of the day. I was doing so much work that I was not able to leave the office until later than expected, so I emailed her back and received a friendly email saying postponing the meeting by an hour or so would be fine. I packed up for the day, drove an hour home, entered a meeting and was fired for the email mistake. I was told over Zoom that I was letting down my coworkers and that I was still under probation (something we had never discussed before, though I had only started three months earlier) and had received warnings (I had not) and would be fired. I then received an email from somebody in a different department, letting me know I would have to drive an hour back to the office, turn in the company laptop I had just brought home, and drive another hour back. My supervisor let me take home the company property I needed to work the next day, fired me over Zoom, though we had both been in the office that afternoon, and then made me drive back to the office to return the company property and collect my things. I would still have been hurt if I had been fired in the office, I still would have found it unfair to overwork a person, barely train them and then but it would have been significantly less cruel to just let me grab the family photos on my desk and leave the laptop then and there. But I wasn't a person at Reconstructing Judaism. I was the latest employee to get chewed up by people who sometimes didn't know what they wanted and sometimes knew what they wanted but had no idea how to express it, while still making it the problem of the person or people they expected that thing from.