Don’t waste your time like I did. - Senior Associate Genius Gems Employee Review

Warning, this is a long read. If you asked the staff, “do you truly enjoy working here?” 98% of them will say no. And that is all due to the environment created by the bosses in the workspace. 1. Consistent bad mouthing: there has been more times I can count on my fingers where I hear staff complain about the constant cursing and yelling for either not doing something right, forgetting to do something, or they do something but you misinterpreted their actions. It does not matter if you grew up in a loud household for you to naturally act like this. You are the COO of this company and we work directly with you almost every day. Act professional in front of your staff because you’re the reason why many of us refuse to confront you about anything nor are comfortable speaking to you because you seem hostile. 2. Expectations but no pay: you often increase the tasks given to star individuals when you are not paying them the wage they deserve. However, you pick and choose who gets a dollar increase and who does not. You have no fair procedure or protocol to decide who gets a raise and who doesn’t. You have no organization nor understanding of how you should pay your employees. Yet, you try to step away from the company because you want it to run on its own. In reality, it cannot run on its own so you must be involved in all that you can until it’s not, so do not treat employees like they are supposed to run the show because they are not, that’s your responsibility. Maybe if you raised everyone’s pay $1 more like you should’ve since minimum wage is $16 now they’d put on more effort. 3. Improper scheduling: this one is my favorite to complain about because I’ve heard endlessly about this issue. Here’s to name a few: someone requests time off and you accept but still schedule them and make it their responsibility to find coverage or else they have to come in, canceling someone’s shift an hour before because you realized you don’t need them anymore, scheduling someone on a day they marked unavailable and making it their responsibility to find coverage or else they have to come in, texting staff last minute to stay late or some early but act petty when they say no (that is poor planning on your part, not theirs), always shifting people’s hours here and there without proper communication as to why. One key thing to note here is that 95% of your staff are in school so you cannot expect for them to drop their educational needs to attend a shift when their education and grades depend on it. If you so deeply feel upset about this, hire people who aren’t in school anymore. 4. Lack of communication: whenever something new gets put out such as a product, service, checklist, new coworkers, new roles, etc, NOTHING is announced. How do you expect your staff to actually follow through with the procedures of work if you refuse to explain to them what these new offers are? Then you get upset when it is done wrong but that is not on them, that is on you. Perhaps hire a role where someone can do this specifically for you because clearly this is either forgotten so often or pushed away because you don’t think it’s important. 5. Lack of Training: there’s is no proper training done. Simple as that. Staff receive an hour lecture about safety measures, then maybe a one hour demonstration of making slime or glitter tiles, and then they get thrown into the lions den to fend for themselves. You don’t communicate as to who is supposed to train them, you expect staff to do it. You schedule new staff on the busiest days when they don’t have a clue of what to do. (ex: one girl was scheduled for her first day ever on a Saturday which is our busiest day with no training at all, you did not inform any staff about a new person coming in, you did not even come in until 2 hours later, and therefore she was so shaken up that she quit the day of) if you want your company to run smoothly, train your staff better. 6. Nothing is clean: you own a magna tile play space and don’t clean the magna tiles. Not even spraying them down once a week. Not even once a month and that’s a stretch. These tiles are so dirty that they leave your finger tips dark after an hour of playing or cleaning up with them. There are dust bunnies everywhere but you don’t concern about that. The super space tiles have literally been thrown up on and all you’ve done is give it a good scrub and put it back out for play. Fun fact: I found 2 tiles that still had throw up on them, dried. And you refused to throw it out bc it cost you money. The cleanliness of this space is absolutely disgusting and that is the reason why adults won’t come to play on their own without their kids. 7. Overworking staff: staff get overworked by being understaffed and this means breaks can’t be taken. Every staff member deserves to have a break no matter what and to over work them so your pockets can be filled is purely greedy. Let alone not paying them properly. The first red flag is this: minimum wage was 15 and we got paid 16. Now minimum wage is 16 and you didn’t increase everyone’s pay by a dollar more? We are all literally working a dollar less than what we are supposed to. That’s insane to me. 8. Lack of promotion: stop giving hope to staff about promotions when you make it so hard for them to get a pay raise. You want staff to show up to earn a raise, but when they do, you make them do even more work and pay them nothing. This only benefits you and shows how little you care about the efforts made by your employees who keep your business running. 9. Lack of child care procedures: how is it that we work in a kids place but none of us are certified in CPR, Epipen, or any safety measures for children? Yet, you want to prioritize staff getting a food certification so bad for a kitchen that handles frozen food and is meat free. The children who come into this space are not safe because god forbid something happens and none of us know what to do, that is on you because you did not enforce safety measures from the start. 10. Stop micromanaging. If we say things are good, they’re good! That’s all I can say for that part. To the owners who are reading this, if this review comes off as extremely negative, or aggressive, or shocking, I hope it does. A wake up call is greatly needed. Working at this company for so long, as a very observant person, it’s extremely disappointing to see where this company has gone. I’m only expressing my frustrations and annoyance for all the things I’ve witnessed and heard from staff over the years but never had the opportunity to say in person because truly this needed to be said. And I speak for all the staff who’s complained to me personally about the issues they faced in your company.