Versa is the Worst-a - Anonymous employee Versa Creative Employee Review

While at first the company seemed supportive and collaborative, a change occurred over time--or it became more clear the longer one worked there. If the company had a business plan, real mission or vision, it was not shared with employees. Instead, the mission was retooled to sound good but had no meaning beyond that. The unofficial mission of the company went further away from branding and strong creative work to templates, an assembly line approach to the work, and destructive expectations and office policies. These destructive expectations included expecting unlimited overtime (work through lunch or 1-2 hours after end of day, regularly to complete work), holiday work (60 hours per week during the winter months including some weekends, last ditch efforts on online ads on Thanksgiving/Black Friday plus social media damage control when websites inevitably crashed from heavy traffic) , and constantly expanding job scope (copywriters tasked with writing the CEO's correspondence and writing/editing project proposals due to management's very limited abilities in these areas). Compensation is on the lower end for the industry (not at all competitive for the scope of work and for Houston, TX), so expanding job scope plus routine and seasonal overtime could hardly be compensated with a few hundred dollars (if that) of quarterly bonuses. And actually getting quarterly bonuses had more to do with if that employee was well-liked by management rather than quality and quantity of work. Management is not really capable of assessing either. It's the Dunning-Kruger effect in action. After all this, imagine getting an email (dictated by the CEO and cleaned up into readable prose by someone else) chastising team members for being a few minutes late. Though most employees are (low) salaried (in order to exploit them via overtime expectations), management would still insist upon cutting into their PTO for minor tardies. That was their method of trying to control a team who were overworked, stressed, and growing disgruntled by the lack of organization, leadership, and support. In an office environment where the creative teams have the greatest understanding of the accounts, the campaigns, the workflow, and the schedule, the CEO instead busied herself with monitoring who walked in a few minutes late because she had little grip on anything else. You could, however, once the company actually got a professional email service see where the CEO was if not in the office that day as she did not (could not?) make her work calendar private. Sometimes the spa kept her out all day. And really, since her main role in client pitches was decorative, I suppose it was a good use of company time. In all, there were lots of big ideas and promises from management with very little respect for employee input. A new project management tool was purchased and made mandatory without input from those who would actually be required to use it, without an overview or training of any kind, and of course, without a buy-in, it ultimately failed. What was shocking was how little work and employee support management thought they were responsible for. The design software were all student packages (not for commercial use) and not the new Adobe Creative Cloud which is the industry standard. For employees who worked remotely (only permitted in an effort not to have yet another talented person jump ship), VPNs didn't work and the company either avoided or refused to pay for cell service and internet access. Really, just an embarrassing mess. I could go on...