Below Market Pay:
This company prides itself on using RSUs to meet the "market rate" of fair salary. However, the salary transparency tool fails to communicate that your RSU's are vested quarterly and proceeds to make the employee believe their yearly salary is fairly reflected. The company's salary should not reflect 4 years RSUs, but only 1 year and that's assuming the stock market is doing well. My RSU's were granted at a price when the price of PCTY stock was high but became available to sell when the market crashed. They should grant RSUs as a solid number, not an amount and it should be more-so a bonus as opposed to "part of your salary". It is becoming very expensive to live in IL and my salary here was not keeping up with inflation. Leadership would gaslight you if you brought this up. They'd try and convince you that you don't know what market rate is or that you aren't seeing the true value of RSUs. The reality is that Paylocity chose RSUs as a large part of an employee's income because it saves the company a lot of money on operational costs that they have to report to investors. If they actually used better compensation analysis methods, we wouldn't have to resort to gambling with a third or quarter of our yearly compensation just to make end's meet in an inflationary market.
Very Immature Environment:
The standards here are very subpar and do not align with a real “Agile” environment. Despite this, toxic positivity is rampant and any employee who questions this are gaslit (sometimes publicly) and made to feel crazy themselves. Employees who enforce toxic positivity and help eliminate critique are promoted despite having very little technical skill and capability for the job.
Toxic Leadership:
The CEO, Steve is cool. However, many of those that report to him (besides Andy) are failing to report crucial pain points. These instead come up in executive transparency calls and some executives are caught off guard and look like fools. They pass it off as ignorance, but they are aware of these issues and simply choose to not prioritize them or address them. People who are hired into management are chosen not on merit, but their ability to promote the "culture" which is the biggest crutch of the company. Yes, it's fun to work there at times. Events, amenities, and work life balance are some of the bests I've seen. However, it’s like putting jewels on a cardboard box, it doesn’t change the fact that this company is a cesspool for poor practice and soon a competitor will rise up above us with good culture AND solid leadership. This in turn could make a third of your salary (from the RSUs) to drop because we aren’t the cool kid on the block anymore and no longer a smart investment choice.
Skill is Not Valued:
Again, this company does not prefer to hire on a person’s capabilities. They want rank and file culture pushers. Do not work here longer than a couple of years unless you want to risk becoming unskilled and a stagnant professional in your field. Leadership pushes for people to adopt projects outside of their swim lanes and thus hurt a person’s effectiveness in-line with their expertise in the long run. They’ll make you waste your time with culture projects that HR should be doing instead. They do not empower service departments to handle even some of the most basic client issues and then those leaks into departments that have no right to be talking to clients. People get burned out and then quit.
HR Turns Away:
HR is there to protect the business first and foremost. Do not expect the “Human” part of HR to be a priority. They fail to act upon business functional grievances and again, like all leadership, utilize gaslighting and deflection tactics to change the perspective of the struggling teams.
Heavy Turnover:
This company has had heavy turnover in critical departments since January 2020. So, just prior to the pandemic. However, they insist on putting the blame of essential veterans and technical experts that are important for sustainability on “the great resignation”. They also tout the opposite on retention, saying “retention is low”. They refuse to talk about retention on a department-by-department basis which would tell a different story. Instead, they lump all department retention data into one (which includes data from quickly growing teams that naturally will not show retentions because 2 people come in for every 1 person leaving).
Toxic Politics:
Upper Management (and sometimes mid and lower) are trained from the top. To use political maneuvers in their communication and prioritizations (deflection, passive aggressiveness, gaslighting, etC) to make things ALWAYS seem more positive than they actually are. We hire in good managers, but after a few months or so, they become toxic just like the Upper Management and Execs who “mentor” them. Leadership should sift these bad leaders out and remove them. They are infecting decent people with bad management practices and it’s obvious.
