Increasingly toxic work culture:
- Gossiping is common even among managers, senior managers, and HR. It's difficult to trust speaking with middle/senior management or HR on confidential topics when they'll gossip about what you've said to their department and company friends.
- Favoritism is common around the company. Whether for an open internal position or for better bonus-earning client work, often the best person for the job misses out because the decision-maker plays favorites. As a result, morale among those who are not best friends with the decision-makers is low.
No Work-Life Balance:
- The work hours are rough in most cases, and there's an always 'on call' atmosphere in most departments. There's often tons of work thrown at employees at all times of the day and all of which is considered 'urgent and immediate,' which means working 60-70 hours per week is common.
- While posted work hours are generally 9am-6pm, if you sign-off at 6pm or even 6:15pm, people wonder if you're even working at all. This feeds into the expectation of working long hours.
Lack of effective management:
- Middle management is promoted from within, and despite having little experience (mostly promoted to manager in as little as 2 years after their college graduation), they became managers of teams with 6-12+ direct reports. With little training or experience, most middle managers are not good at managing.
- Senior management has grown immensely in the last 2 years and especially of late. Unfortunately, they have communicated very little meaningful action and no direction to the rest of the company. There doesn't seem to be a shared vision for the company that its striving toward.
