Hanover’s been in my rearview mirror for a while now, but when someone sent me the CHRO’s response to the last Glassdoor post (and after I read the subsequent “review” about “mean girls,” authored by someone who represents the “ideal Hanover hire” but doesn’t fit the description of anyone who actually worked there), I had to jump in.
Hanover Research is a real-life experiment in how hard you can push your employees and drive down product quality while still turning a profit. If you work there, you will feel bad all the time. You’ll feel physically worn down from being overworked. You’ll feel guilty for contributing to low-quality reports that clients (many times school districts, colleges, and nonprofits) overpay for. You’ll feel like a professional failure for not living up to the expectations—often arbitrary and conflicting, sometimes adverse to quality and accuracy—set by the various managers you’ll interact with (and believe me, you’ll know when they’re unhappy because you get graded for every project you submit). You’ll wring your hands worrying about potential copyright violations and plagiarism as a result of management’s unwillingness to offer copyright training or pay for anti-plagiarism software (despite editors requesting this support for years).
The idea that Hanover listens to feedback and is open to change but just can’t make change happen quickly…is a misrepresentation at the height of irony. You’re talking about a place where researchers get five days to complete reports that will “pass” for six weeks of work (i.e., the timeframe quoted to clients). And you’re telling us that you can’t do anything quickly?! Listen. When this place actually wants something to change, it happens basically overnight and leaves your head spinning when you finally hear about it through an official announcement or, more likely, through the gossip vine. And if you don’t believe me because I’m just a former employee who doesn’t have enough perspective, flip back to the Glassdoor reviews from several years ago and gasp with shock when you see people complaining about identical issues. I spent years at Hanover (my bad, I know – I swear I really thought I could help fix the place), but the only changes I ever saw were to cut benefits, reduce resources, and hire lower-quality managers.
About the sexism: yes, it is real. The CHRO’s last response confirms it: 49% of the promotions went to women last cycle, but what she doesn’t say is that the vast majority of employees are women, so that 49% in no way suggests an equal promotion rate. The Hanover Organization of Women is a complete joke – it’s never done anything to change the policies that affect women at Hanover (instead, they have a weekly newsletter and meet every now and then to discuss Lean In or whatever “women need to try harder” book is popular at the time). I could accept the theory that women are underpaid and under-promoted at Hanover because we tend to be worse self-advocates, except that women at Hanover are regularly told at performance reviews that they’re too assertive or mean or insufficiently nurturing (something I’ve never heard them add to a man’s performance review). This is the kind of stuff that women have to put up with in a lot of workplaces but that would be easy fixes for a company that markets itself as pro-woman.
On that note: the performance review process is notoriously unfair, so much so that Hanover typically sees a spike in resignations about 6-8 weeks after the performance review cycle ends. I know that raises and promotions are a touchy subject in a lot of places, so I will share a few details and let you judge for yourself whether Hanover is a place where you could feel secure:
1. Performance reviews occur every six months, ostensibly so that people can receive more frequent feedback. However, the performance review cycle does not conclude until 3-4 months into the next cycle. So, for the cycle that ended Dec 31, managers began writing and discussing reviews in February, reviews were given in March, and the cycle ended in April when promotions were announced. This means that if you were passed up for a promotion, you now only have about 2 months to make the necessary changes to earn a promotion during the next cycle.
2. Although HR swears that off-cycle promotions and raises never occur, they occur all the time. You will regularly hear about co-workers who get stealth-promoted off-cycle and who are rewarded with raises for threatening to quit.
3. During your performance review, managers who are just as likely as not to be your age and less experienced in research will rate you on a range of criteria that include the unknowable (e.g., your intellectual curiosity), the poorly defined (e.g., your ability to produce work that requires “minimal” editing), factors completely out of your control (e.g., how well you perform editing and project leading tasks, which you cannot request and which you may never be assigned for reasons that have nothing to do with your ability), and qualities included in the performance review criteria to punish dissent (e.g., whether you have a positive attitude).
4. Performance reviews include an opaque process known as “consensus meetings,” in which your personal manager presents his/her case regarding your performance (measured on a 1-5 scale). In theory, this practice would allow all the managers you work with to come to agreement. In reality, the consensus meetings remove the only thing that traditionally helped out the little guy: the manager’s sense of obligation and/or guilt. Because of the consensus meeting format, managers can go back to their direct report and say, “sorry, the room was against you,” rather than owning up to their own inability or unwillingness to be a good advocate (or their honest opinion that you’re not cutting it).
This isn’t to say that the middle managers (content directors/managing content directors) are bad people or inconsiderate, but they’re busy hoping for their own ill-defined promotions and dealing with clients who are unsurprisingly dissatisfied with the one-day, incorrect quant project that they had to wait several weeks for. Think of them as the husband who gets berated by his boss all day at work and then comes home and snaps at his wife. Definitely not blameless, but also not unsympathetic.
Where are the real promotion opportunities at Hanover? In HR! Everyone on HR’s Learning & Development team has been promoted to manager or senior manager, making the department Hanover’s very own Lake Wobegon. If you’re thinking this has to do with their crackerjack performance, you would be mistaken. Not only do they provide almost no useful PD opportunities, but the team (currently and historically) has consisted almost entirely of failed researchers who could never earn a promotion while they were actually doing the job that they’re now well paid to teach other people to do. I know that sounds harsh, but consider that they are uniquely positioned as former researchers with an influence in HR but have made seemingly no effort as advocates for their former peers.
