Global Prairie Reviews

- Extreme focus on utilization, profitability and billable hours leads to poor practices among staff (prioritizing speed over quality, internal competition for billable hours, poor budget management) - There's a perception that working too much isn't ok, but those who do are rewarded and given leadership roles despite having zero ability to maintain a healthy work/life balance. Many Director-level employee owners are regularly working 50-60 hours a week, sending nightly and weekend emails/messages, and make no effort to communicate to younger employees that this is not healthy, ok, or sustainable. - Founders lead the company with a heavy hand, and often micro-manage teams and individuals who are brought in with strong pedigrees. - Little-to-no diversity. Most employees have similar backgrounds that include Ivy League educations and/or wealthy upbringings. While this is certainly a great way to hire smart people, it leads to a lack of varying opinions, perspectives and skillsets that are vital in the modern communications landscape. - Meeting load is pure insanity. A regular workday for a given employee, particularly more senior employees, includes 7-8 hours of meetings. This gives zero time for professional development, research, inspiration, or doing actual, tangible work. - Brainstorming system is antiquated and revolves around putting as many smart people on a call as can make the meeting, and hoping for good ideas. - Hiring process is glacial in pace. - Timelines are nearly always quick turn and overlap, requiring employees to solve client problems and do work that doesn't reach its full potential in a very limited amount of time. - No professional development efforts - High turnover rate (particularly in the last 2 years) - Little effort to promote the agency to potential clients. Website and case studies are dated, work is rarely, if ever, shared externally.

Terrible work management, no programs like Asana, Trello, or Ziflow to manage work. Everything assignment-wise done through dropbox, so naturally scattered work with no clear direction on what needs to be done, all done through dropbox documents, which is not the best function for dropbox. Onboarding so extensively long. 30 days of onboarding. Too many programs being used for onboarding/ portals/ messaging, all things that could be collectively done in one communicative program, so again that ruined the time and productivity. Far too many meetings. So many meetings that it would disrupt the flow of work multiple times a day. 7-8 meetings a day is excessive. The billable vs non billable hours sheet/ situation was so incredibly unorganized and unclear. There has to be a more organized method to Track hours. Work distribution lacked so much communication (again due to no project management programs in use.) so projects would often overlap with other assignments from different departments and neither would know the other assigned work for one person at the same time and didn’t give time to complete because of no communication/ coordination. Projects were sometimes very briefly explained over webcalls, with little to no description written down with detail, sometimes a small follow up (still not detailed) of the assignment through email after the call. But the webcall would consist of “i want this this this and this to be done.” With nothing written and no project description, details, and deadline, we’d be forced to follow up multiple times. The diversity was virtually nonexistent, though diversity was virtue signaled so much, along with ethics being shoved down your throat, but not being practiced. You are a number here, you are a stat here, the “family” narrative is pushed to make you work weekends and very late after hours.