employer cover photo
employer logo
employer logo

Pew Research Center

Is this your company?

good institution but uneven management - Anonymous employee Pew Research Center Employee Review

2.0
9 Jan 2017
Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

well-respected institution with interesting work and good upper management. Benefits and pay are also competitive. You can see an impact from your work in coverage of its reports.

Cons

One issue: middle management is uneven-some managers are very ineffective and difficult to work with. This partly a personal issue, with certain managers undermining employees and disregarding input or opinions. It's also a professional issue, with poor project management and unclear guidance leading to chaotic work flows. A bigger issue is that there are few internal mechanisms to address this-review of managers doesn't include all direct reports, there are no dispute resolution mechanisms, etc. So if you're stuck with a bad manager there's not much to do but leave. Another is that there is a clear hierarchy among projects, and if you end up on of the lower-priority projects you can quickly become marginalized with little opportunity to move into a different area.

Explore other reviews about Pew Research Center

5.0
17 Jun 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Great atmosphere and strong emphasis on teamwork

Cons

Upward mobility can be difficult

1.0
20 Jul 2025
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

The Center conducts good and rigorous work. Excellent research in a time when polling is under fire from different directions and angles.

Cons

Don’t feel that leadership cares about its employees. Generally don’t seem want to engage employee concerns— and just do what they want to do anyway when they do engage employees. For example, they used to do a yearly all staff survey of satisfaction. Last year, they nixed the Center wide meeting to discuss the results. This year they just skipped the survey altogether— at a time where I’d personally guess employee dissatisfaction to be at a 5+ year high.Think this is particularly bad now that the center shares a space with the Trust, leading to both institutional creep. There’s also been an ongoing rollback of remote/hybrid work— keep getting told there’s “no slippery slope” but keep moving to more time in the office for reasons that are inconsistent — despite the fact that, at this point in time, anyone hired in the past 5 years was hired with the expectation of only 2 days in-office and has never known anything more (and that is the culture they’re familiar with at this point). There’s also a career hierarchy in theory but less so in practice, meaning few opportunities for internal upward growth.

1
See reviews by: Helpful|Rating|Date|All