SES (MO) Reviews

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Security Equipment Supply (SES) has an authoritarian, cliquish, micromanaging, bully culture that does not tolerate dissent. This is a small, family run business with a lot of drama, favoritism, and politics. Any sort of dissent is viewed with anger and will result in you being fired. You will also be fired simply if a manager doesn’t like you. Management lacks the self-awareness to acknowledge their weaknesses and instead pins those shortcomings on their subordinates. Employees are regularly provided with incomplete or incorrect work instructions from multiple members of management who do not acknowledge that they provided incomplete or incorrect instructions. Instead, employees are chastised for “not asking enough questions” to catch these errors and omissions as if the employees should always be able to tell which instructions management didn’t provide or got wrong. The mantra “ask questions” is repeated by management often, but is not a friendly offer of assistance from management as it would appear on the surface. Instead, it’s a pretext for micromanagement. Management uses employees asking them questions as a pretext for heavily micromanaging their work and will react with anger if employees do not ask them a sufficient number of questions. Highly tenured, well-connected patronage hire managers are allowed to play around on TikTok instead of providing business analysts the project requirements they need during requirement gathering meetings. Managers are not held accountable for this. Instead, the blame is placed on rank and file employees for “not asking enough questions” of management. The culture at SES is extremely clique based with the company being controlled by a small clique of highly tenured managers and the rank and file employees aligned with them who operate like an adult version of a high school cool kids clique. If you do not want to or are unable to become an accepted member of this clique, your time at SES will be miserable and short. Outside of this cool kids clique, most employees are relatively short tenured and there is high turnover. Introverted employees are constantly pressured to socialize more in the office instead of being respected for being the introverts that they are. “Social skills” are one of the metrics that you are officially graded on. Simply being nice isn’t enough to get a high score for social skills. You must be a social butterfly and very compliant to anything management says in order to score high on this metric. There is a very authoritarian culture despite the claim of having a family atmosphere. Management seems to believe that leadership entails imposing their authority onto those under them. Management will talk so intensely as to make getting a word in edgewise impossible. Disagreeing with management results in getting immediately terminated. Management's idea of motivating people would be to constantly remind them that the higher-ups are watching. These higher-ups were never mentioned by name during these exhortations despite it being a small company where everyone knows everyone as if there was a fear of mentioning these people by name. It was like working for the unmentionable Voldemort from Harry Potter. I personally work equally as hard and treat everyone equally as well regardless of whether I’m dealing with a powerful person or an ordinary rank and file person, so reminding me that the higher-ups are watching isn’t going to motivate or impress me at all. There is more to life than power and fancy job titles. There seemed to be a lot of fear of the higher-ups at SES which is interesting for a small company where everyone knows everyone and that claims to have a family culture. If SES was truly a family, it would be the world’s most dysfunctional family. Everything is considered to be an urgent, emergency rush at SES to the point of being absurd. If you don’t respond to every request and do every task instantaneously, you will be in trouble. This is not the same as expecting employees to be reasonably prompt in their work. It seems like every task assigned to you at SES was already due yesterday by the time it's assigned to you. This expectation of urgency only applied to rank and file employees as most of the managers had an obnoxious, disrespectful tendency to never respond to emails or to respond to emails with an extreme delay of several days which would never be tolerated from rank and file employees. You often had to interact with these people in person in order to get a response from them. SES is the kind of place where you would be told to set up a new employee in the system who is starting work the next day with one minute left in the workday as if management somehow didn’t know this employee was going to start work until one minute before closing the day before. I was given a complex project with an impossibly short deadline due to its complexity and me having to learn new skills which I was more than glad to learn. I regularly communicated project updates to management so that they were aware of my progress and that I couldn’t finish this project within this timeframe. At some point, some higher-up manager got angry at the supposedly “too slow” progress of this project, and I was made to feel this person’s wrath which made its way to me via lower level management. It seemed that one of the key tasks of managers at SES was to relay the anger of higher level managers to their subordinates. I was disciplined and eventually fired for respectfully offering my side in this dispute over the supposed lack of timeliness in the completion of this report. Rank and file employees are not allowed to dissent or to show any sort of negative emotion, such as anger, but management is allowed to regularly erupt in angry outbursts. This is an example of holding rank and file employees to a higher standard than highly tenured managers who are allowed to flaunt the expectations that rank-and-file employees are held to. This is the opposite of how it should be and is an ingrained part of the culture at SES where title and tenure allow one to get away with things that the rank and file and less tenured cannot. SES is the type of workplace where you will be scolded for being a minute late to work even if you regularly work through lunch and work late. There is also no flexibility in choosing the shift that you will work. Some of the managers and highly tenured rank and file employees at SES are so tech illiterate that when you request a Microsoft Word, Excel, or PowerPoint file they will print it out and hand you a paper copy instead of emailing you a digital copy. This is not useful when you need the information in a digital format. I usually just used the printed copy as source material for creating a new digital format copy instead of going back and forth with these people to try and get them to send me a digital copy instead. When you are hired at SES, you will likely not be hired at your full salary as would happen in a normal company. Instead, you will be hired at a reduced amount, and the remaining amount will be added at the end of your first employee review so long as it’s a positive review. In my case, I needed a positive review in order to receive the final $3,000 of my salary. Human resources told me upon my hire that this review would occur at the six month mark. In reality, due to the incompetence of the company and lack of communication between departments, it happened at 90 days. Normally, I wouldn’t complain about being able to get my full salary three months sooner, but my review unfairly ranked me as a poor worker which resulted in me not getting my remaining $3,000 of salary. I was ranked poorly due to “social skills,” not getting the big report done “quickly enough,” and not “asking enough questions.” SES does not have a normal 401k, but instead has a less lucrative retirement plan known as a simplified employee pension (SEP) that you have to have 5 years of tenure to participate in. Since most employees outside of the cool kids clique don’t last that long, most employees will never make use of this SEP. SES is a family owned business owned by two older men who are no longer involved in the day to day operations. One of these men is completely retired and the other one is semi-retired and comes into the corporate office on Fridays. The day-to-day operations are handled by the president who is the son of the semi-retired owner. SES doesn’t trust rank and file employees enough to allow them to be alone in the corporate office without a manager on duty to supervise them. If you ever have to work in the office after 4:00 PM or 4:30 PM and there isn’t a manager on duty for the evening, you will be asked to leave the office for the day as if they don’t trust rank and file employees enough to allow them to work without a manager onsite. There are good people at SES, but they are outside of the highly tenured cool kids clique and are mostly low tenured rank and file people.