At Starpay, I found the work environment to be chaotic and toxic – resulting in a very high rate of employee turnover. On multiple occasions during my time at Starpay, I witnessed colleagues with 20+ years of payroll and accounting experience toss up their hands in frustration and storm out of this office. I’ve witnessed employees with more than a year of service be laid off without severance; and others resign without notice. If you were to ask me why this atmosphere was so dire, I would refer you to the top of the company’s org chart.
The owner of Starpay was previously a top-selling salesperson for a large payroll service provider, and at Starpay, she primarily handles the company’s sales responsibilities. Since the owner focuses mainly on sales, oversight of Starpay’s operations, IT, and accounting functions are assumed by another party. Because this person also holds a senior position outside of Starpay, he is rarely physically present in the Starpay office during regular hours. However, his presence is felt due to his frequent phone calls and emails to Starpay employees throughout the work day, and his visits to the office after hours and on weekends. Often, I found this person’s communications to staff to be caustic, unprofessional, negative, and demoralizing. This person was compared, by another colleague, to the classic Pooh character, Eeyore, due to his pessimistic, gloomy, depressed, anhedonic demeanor.
In my observation, the owner did not display an inclination for payroll operations or back office functions. Nevertheless, she regularly arrived at the office in the middle of the day and disrupted these ongoing activities without appearing to consider fellow partners, managers, or employees. She frequently disrupted our train of thought, entered our personal spaces, and did not seem to consider the impact of her actions. A former colleague often compared the owner to Medusa - the Greek mythological monster with living venomous snakes in place of hair. While I’m sure that clients, potential clients, CPA’s and potential employees found the owner personable, once I began working there, I found her actions self-centered, condescending, and rude.
At Starpay, I observed co-workers at Director and Managerial levels regularly second-guessed and countermanded by ownership. During my tenure, the company elected to transition their payroll software to a new platform. Despite warnings to the contrary from the company’s managers, staff, and even the software platform developer, the owners decided to make this transition on an accelerated schedule – with minimal resources dedicated to testing, and still less allocated to training. The result was a rollout full of glitches upsetting many clients and placing additional stress on an already overloaded staff. This just one of many examples I witnessed of ownership’s unrealistic expectations and reckless actions causing an unnecessary increase in workload and requiring longer work hours without any additional compensation.
The owner did not seem to have any respect for the employee’s personal time - her actions motivated more by saving pennies than the well-being of the employees. To avoid paying overtime, she would frequently elect to send hourly staff home early in the midst of a chaotic workday with the expectation that the salaried staff (including employees earning less than the minimum salary allowable by the state for exempt employees) stay late to pick up the slack; this often meant working 10+ hour days with no additional compensation. At no time during my tenure, was an established procedure for work reviews or pay increases presented to me. Benefits were not offered to me in my position; and I was granted only one week of vacation after a full year of service. A quote in reference to this treatment is the source of the title of this review, “Labor Unions Were Created Because of People Like [this Owner].”
