Great on the surface, riddled with internal issues - Anonymous employee VSSL Agency Employee Review

In the spirit of transparency, it’s really hard to read this. Most importantly because we don’t want anyone on our team to feel this way. To be honest, our first instinct was to go through this review, line by line, and provide responses that attempted to negate each element of this feedback. Then, we thought about taking the opposite approach and only focusing on what we should change. In the end, because this is a public forum, we felt like the best way forward was a balanced approach that gives feedback on the management recommendations and actions that we intend to take based on this feedback. Regarding the company's PTO policy, yes, new employees accrue a full 17 days of PTO annually that is inclusive of California mandated Sick Leave. While these 17 days are above and beyond the industry average, more importantly, this is the starting PTO plan for employees. Awarded PTO increases for employees after 2 years, after 5 years, and again after 10 years. Each and every PTO level is higher than industry averages, topping out at almost a month of PTO for our 10-year tenured team members. Regarding the recommendation to management to identify and address employee well-being without getting feedback from team members about their well-being, this is a tough one because we are a marketing agency. Our expertise is helping businesses promote their products and services by developing and executing marketing strategies. Our expertise is not picking up on non-verbal, or subtle feedback about how an employee may or may not feel – especially when most of the team, for most of the week, is remote. We endeavor to help team members who let us know they need help. As a boutique marketing agency, we have to focus on client satisfaction, otherwise we will not survive in the ultra-competitive space where we operate. That is why we have created a number of communication avenues for employees to provide us with feedback about how they are feeling, including: • An open-door policy to speak with any member of management, at any time, about anything. • We provide all team members with weekly 1:1s with their supervisor to review projects and deliverables, but this is also an ongoing opportunity for team members to discuss any challenges they are experiencing within the work environment. • We perform anonymous employee engagement surveys annually to solicit feedback. We share the results with the entire team and detail what action we can (and can’t) take to improve the company and team. • We provide an anonymous email for team members to give leadership any and all feedback. • While we are not big enough to have our own internal full-time HR employee, we do provide access to an HR resource. In short, when we get feedback, we take action. But in the absence of feedback, we remain focused on our core business, which is delivering marketing solutions to our clients, which, in turn, leads to company growth which will, in turn, lead to greater opportunities (and compensation) for our employees. Finally, in terms of forcing team members to sacrifice their work-life balance, our structure is a hybrid work environment where team members work from home, on average, 3 days a week. This allows the team the freedom to manage their schedule in a way to best balance their projects and manage their personal life. And if someone is sick, we actively encourage them to stay home and take a sick day. We don’t want them to get the rest of the crew sick, and we know work quality is impaired when we don’t feel 100%. If you are having an issue, let us know so we can take action. At the same time, we understand that for certain work styles or personalities, our style is not for you. In this case, knowing what you know about how we operate, and that we need you to tell us about issues you are facing, it may be better for you to find an organization that is a better fit for your style. It’s likely a much larger organization than we are. That’s ok. With that being said, there are concerning comments in this review that require further investigation. We are going to take action to uncover specifics around comments such as “management…needs to address issues with hostile team members.” At this time, we don’t know what this specifically means, but if one of our team members feels this way, we will fix this, full stop. We have escalated this as a top priority for our leadership team and will be implementing an action plan that seeks to uncover the root of these feelings and course correct as soon as possible. As stated, it was extremely hard to read this review, especially on the heels of two years as a best place to work in San Diego, but we will take this feedback to heart and take action. For that, we thank you.