The company does not seem to desire to keep any of these excellent employees they find. The CEO expressly said he only expects people to stay for a couple years, in response to the clear turnover issue they've had even for years pre-pandemic and increasingly since the pandemic began. When employees show their worth, skills, and willingness to support each other, they are met with more responsibility and little to no increase in compensation. If you do receive a promotion or a raise, don't hold your breath, it can take several weeks or typically months, because even leadership is overworked. A small association (fewer than 100 employees) is trying to work on a national level with members and volunteers across the country and Canada, span dozens of industries, run several events and campaigns at the same time (and during the fall, coinciding with performance reviews, to the chagrin of employees and managers), and keep up with all of the softwares and updates from SAP, a company with over 100,000 employees.
All of this with unrealistic goals set, to be covered by small teams, often made up of many newer employees, who do not receive adequate training. There is a severe lack of proper onboarding and standardized team/job-specific training available, very little cross-training or contingency preparation for important roles leaving/being absent at all, and turnover from entire teams leaving with no proper documentation, and the company collectively shrugging and leaving those new folks to barely tread water.
When employees expressed that they were overworked, especially amidst a global pandemic, they were met with an "I don't want to hear it" type response, from C-level folks who more so make enough money to be stressed and worked to their extent, while the lower levels absolutely do not. Leadership believes that you should never be late or even come close to working fewer than 40 hours, but has no issue with you working 50-60+ hours and in fact actually expects you to, even though a salary is really agreed upon for the standard 40 hour work week and only more as truly needed.
Communication across the company is inconsistent and often messy. When 5 individuals were let go during the pandemic, they did not communicate the names to anyone, and let everyone gossip to figure it out. Same thing happened when a group of individuals were furloughed on Fridays for multiple months, no communication, just letting everyone have awkward conversations and struggling to work cross-functionally until they figured out who got to keep all of their hours and who took a pay cut. One of those individuals was our sole copy editor, but at least that didn’t last long. We didn’t see a single leadership member take a pay cut, just the underpaid individuals, who were just told to “take a walk outside, exercise, eat a healthy meal, step away from the computer for a short break, etc.” in response to being overworked and overwhelmed in a pandemic. And when people quit, sometimes we didn’t find out until their last week or even last couple days because leadership doesn’t announce it in a timely fashion.
The CEO attempted to connect to employees during the height of the pandemic with individual phone calls. From my own experience and those I’ve heard about from others, he was dismissive, accusatory, and did not take any action items from any of these calls. His team “acknowledgements” show consistently that he is not familiar with the inner workings of the company. Between his general attitude towards those working the hardest at the company, the virtual and in-person event/meeting attendance dropping significantly, sponsor dissatisfaction, membership and renewals declining, and unwillingness to improve virtual offerings or diversify revenue, many of us are shocked the board hasn’t noticed or stepped in at all.
