- Salary is not competitive, the majority of my team was paid dozens of thousands less than the average salary for Chicago, asking for a salary increase will often be met with weeks of pushback, back and forth, or flat out denial. Salary bumps during mid years are virtually unheard of and managers are given a limited pool to distribute between your team during end years, which results in very few promotion opportunities and lackluster salary increases if you are not the lucky person to receive the promotion. End of 2022's cost of living adjustment was between 3-4%, nowhere near the actual cost of living change in the US. I have heard of one instance of an equity adjustment at Avant and that was back in 2017 - Less holidays than a typical finance company, there is no reason Avant should not follow bank holidays. Juneteenth is acknowledged but is not a corporate holiday - Forced hybrid. Chicago based Avantees were told they must return to office 3 days a week at the beginning of 2023, and 4 days if you want a permanent desk. While collaboration is the reason leadership provides for this mandate, most teams are filled with remote employees, which results in Chicago based employees commuting to the office just try to find an available room every couple of hours to take their regular team meetings - Lack of career growth, since promotions are limited, employees often get stuck in roles and get silo'd to a limited set of responsibilities. Though Avant boasts a culture of internal growth, recent years have proven that the way to receive a semi competitive salary on a different team is to apply externally or through referral. Employees that have been with Avant for years have been shunted to roles below their experience and worth in favor of new external hires, or hiring back ex Avantees from the "old days" - Workload, theres never been a time that Avantees have not had a massive workload (excusable in the right circumstances), recent years have seen that workload double, if not triple. With two rounds of layoffs within a calendar year, and Avant's overly ambitious goals to move to from startup culture to enterprise, the past two years have been a constant balancing act of trying to satisfy dozens of team and business requests weekly, changing directions at the drop of a hat, and being pushed by leadership to complete projects more efficiently, but dont forget we need to constantly cut costs for services if they can be handled internally! Sprints turn into marathons with no end in sight, there is never a "good" time for a vacation and the lack of cross training leads to many feeling obliged to work during their vacation time (on top of constant off hours work in order to keep up with the workload) - Leadership and transparency, Avant presents this image of transparency and valuing employee feedback, quarterly anon employee satisfaction surveys and monthly town halls seem great, but the value is lost when our feedback is either ignored or we are given non answers. When Avantees voiced concerns of the financial trajectory of the company and the likelihood of another round of layoffs, we were kept largely in the dark about the company's obvious negative financial trajectory and given false confidences that a RIF was "not being considered at this time". Looing past the unfortunately extremely prevalent topic of layoffs in our current economy, employees and team managers alike have been consistently unheard and undervalued. When employee satisfaction rates rapidly started to decline, we were asked what our managers could do to improve satisfaction, when the truth of the matter is that the managers are often stuck between trying to treat their team well and expressing their ideas or concerns to deaf leadership, leading to internal tension between the team itself and nowhere to release that. Time and time again Avantees have expressed their concerns with leaderships choices, the direction of the company itself, and what should be prioritized, and time and time again, leadership has not taken responsibility for their own bad decision making and decided to try to place blame on those below them. Good people work here, but beign a good person doesnt inherently make you a good leader.
