Pros
The onboarding process is great. Most new hires are invited to the corporate office for a week of training. Lunch is provided every day, you get to meet a lot of the leadership group, and Sprague makes you feel like you're an important part of what they're building. The training is thorough, the people are kind, and you get the feeling that Sprague actually values you. After your training is over, you're shipped off to your assigned branch and that's where you start to realize that things at the corporate office are entirely different than at any of the branches. The benefits here aren't bad, but don't expect fair compensation compared to other companies. You'll usually get a year-end bonus and you're given about 8 "holiday" days to use whenever you like. You could even use a "holiday" on a random Wednesday in March instead of taking Memorial Day off if you like. The flexibility with holidays was something I enjoyed a lot and not something I've seen elsewhere. Insurance here is also pretty good. There are many folks (non-leadership) here who are genuinely kind and helpful if you're struggling and need help getting started. Some of my former colleagues here are what I'm most grateful for during my time here, and I certainly don't take them for granted. If you're in a leadership/management role here, you'll get the opportunity to participate in fancy "work-related" get-aways at country clubs, trips to other states like Hawaii, and access to a "higher tier" of company swag that is not available to the "rest" of the employees here. Take that how you will.
Cons
Once you're hired, you're still very much on the chopping block. I've seen plenty of folks get fired or just outright quit during onboarding, which explains why the average tenure here has fallen off so much in the past few years. In my experience, your great experiences will be positive, but your negative experiences can be intense. There is little DE&I here. They put a DE&I program in place for the first time earlier this year, but it was summarily axed a couple of months later and was anything but diverse. The owners are socially conservative, which does influence the company culture. One of the biggest downsides is the pay. You'll get a standard 3% pay increase each year on your anniversary, and you won't be given any kind of cost of living increase. You could be the best performer at the company and still get a 3% increase just like the worst performer at the company. You might be able to negotiate your salary when you first get hired, but after that you're kind of stuck. The biggest problem, and the reason I would recommend avoiding Sprague all together, is the culture. It's evident in the employee feedback surveys. These surveys are supposedly anonymous, but your responses are not as private as they'd have you believe. The results from this survey have gotten worse over the years - so much so that they change up the format each year hoping for better results. In fact, the #1 complaint on the most recent satisfaction survey was that leadership at Sprague had little to no idea how things were actually going at the company. Let's dive in to some examples of the culture from this year - A branch administrator from Las Vegas was asked to cover the LA branch while a new hire admin was being trained in Vegas. Shortly after, the company decided that the LA position needed to be in-person only. The administrator covering LA was given 24 hours to decide to uproot her family and move to LA or have her employment terminated. She was not given the option to continue working from home or return to her normal job at the Las Vegas branch and was terminated days later. After receiving a less than satisfactory QA score while out on a job, a relatively new field service technician out of Tacoma was asked by her branch manager to put together a plan to improve performance. This plan was to include additional ride-alongs with more experienced technicians, additional in-office trainings, etc. The day she showed up to meet with her manager and present her plan, she was instead met by HR and immediately terminated. No performance plan, no write-up, just terminated. The IT director here at Sprague monitors employees' Teams chats across the company to measure how "committed to Sprague" employees are. Employees not deemed 100% committed to Sprague are tagged and are subject to being monitored in case layoffs are needed. Monitoring of Teams chats is done under the guise of "security," but to my knowledge this practice has only ever been used against employees. Big brother is definitely watching here. Office politics exist here, despite what Sprague may claim when talking about it's culture with messages like "all family." The politics here are crucial to understand if you hope to rise through the ranks or don't want to be pigeonholed into a role you do not want to do. There are a handful of people (even in the HR department) who, if you rub them the wrong way or don't give the right impression, can very easily put a cap on your career at Sprague or cut your time at Sprague short. There is a bit of a "drink the kool-aid" vibe here in its ways and culture, which I think distracts from addressing the problems that exist within the company. If you think you're telling someone something in confidence, I can almost certainly promise you - you're not. There are no defined career paths for advancement here on the business side. This worked when Sprague was a smaller company under the previous leadership, but those days are gone with a larger workforce as the company expands. In my opinion, they need to define career paths if they want to encourage folks not to leave as the company continues to scale. I have seen lots of people leave because their careers weren't moving and they weren't receiving any meaningful professional development or growth-oriented feedback. In my experience, people here often leave for jobs that are less demanding that pay significantly more. This is especially frustrating given that directors of certain departments fill positions using reasons like "I'm going on vacation in a few days, so pick one of the three people we interviewed and I'll offer them the job." Ultimately, I believe that all of this is the best reason why I say that Sprague is a place to start your career and stick around for 2-3 years, but definitely not a place to stay. They have a wall at the corporate office where they put pictures of employees who have stayed 20+ years, but only a handful of people actually made it up there despite the company being around for nearly 100 years. That should be fairly telling in itself, but if you think that this sounds like a place you might like to work, I promise you can do better.
