OneIMS Reviews

There are several fundamental issues with the leadership team. First off, they praise you if you come early and stay late (practically 11-12 hour shifts), while looking down upon folks who come in on time and leave on time. I understand the business owners work these long shifts on a daily basis, but that's what you sign up for when running a business. Other team members who have trains to catch, children to attend to, families to take care of, and other duties besides work do not have the privilege of staying these long hours. An another note, the company is stuck and will be very limited in its growth for a few reasons. To begin, they are always putting more focus on where they can cut costs as opposed to focusing on how they can make significantly more sales. Sure, it's important to balance the books and get rid of unnecessary expenses– but that doesn't mean ending subscriptions to important tools that are needed to get work done, treating people and their salaries/wages as another expense item, or skimping out on equipment purchases and hoping that employees can get by and do the work they are paid to do using extremely slow machines. To make things worst, all the money that is saved through this process gets blown off through expensive and unnecessary, camera equipment and toys that the company has no business investing in until they get a hold of the basics. Another dilemma stopping them from growth is that it is still very much a family business. From the owners to the leaders of the company– everyone is related to each other. Everyone else on payroll is an expendable item, making salary/wage negotiations to be quite a gruesome process. Staff to come and go with extremely high turnover rates. It's quite often that one of the leaders may blow up and start yelling frantically in the middle of the office, talk down upon other employees, or make the team work until they their gears grind and are truly burnt out. The only genuine person in the family that is a pleasure to work with is their head of IT. Besides that, no one on the familial leadership team is fit to be a leader. Finally, what upsets me the most is that the leadership team claims to run their business based on their faith, but what we see on a daily basis is far from that. From the words that come out of their mouth, to the way that they manage their money, to the absence of giving back– it gives me a really bad taste to hear them preaching one thing but turning around and doing the complete opposite. Ultimately, this is what drove me to leave the company.

There is a pervasive lack of organizational structure at OneIMS that due to the nature of the executive team is unlikely to ever be solved. This "executive team" I've alluded to consists of a nepotistic triumvirate, all failures in their own ways. Employees come and go (and come and go and come and go) around these people, but they will always be the three-headed ambassador to a comically incompetent organization. A typical client workflow goes as follows: 1) Sales team assumedly prospects, calls, and closes deals. I say "assumedly," because there is absolutely zero transparency into this process. While employee turnover is at eye-popping levels across the entire organization, this "department" consistently overachieves in frustrated people ecstatically quitting. 2) Should the sales team have a true moment of transcendence and actually close a deal, they hand off that newly minted client to a project manager. While most organizations have formalized processes to hand off these clients, and often entire job functions devoted to the smooth passing of clients between departments, OneIMS handles these exchanges with one conversation, wherein the sales team haphazardly mentions everything that was talked about in client meetings without defining what the client is and isn't actually paying for, and without seeking recognition from the PM whatsoever. PMs will not see contracts. The sales team will then retreat to its obfuscated process, never to be heard from again. 3) A project manager reaches out to clients directly to begin the campaign. If the client happens to be a reasonable person who got hoodwinked by an organization incapable of managing their business, there is a chance that the relationship doesn't go terribly. Clients will catch PMs up to speed on their goals, PMs will be acutely aware that reaching them is impossible, PMs will attempt to delay the client from leaving for as long as possible. Again, this is the best case scenario. 4) PMs will be asked for massive projects from clients, often requiring skills, resources, and clearance that they do not have (see my "pros" section for detail on some of these skills). PM will utilize his or her own knowledge, in-house resources, and Google as best they can to accomplish whatever it is the client wants. Because clients have such unclear expectations heading into the PM relationship, they expect PMs to bend over backwards to accommodate their outrageous, often comical requests. 5) Repeat simultaneously x20, because PMs are hilariously overworked due to truly impressive levels of employee turnover. While the above process highlights the largest frustrations with the company, there are many, many more: • Employees are not granted health insurance until they've been with the company for three months. • There are two health insurance plans, ranging from prohibitively expensive to incredulously expensive. I'd like to stress that these are NOT market standard health insurance plans, and even employees with no dependents pay more than 10% of their paycheck to health insurance. • Office is in Skokie, making a commute from the city minimum 35 minutes. Without a car, it's an hour+. • Missed paychecks. Just straight up "hey your money is going to be a few days late." Inexcusable in 2016 (or 2005, for that matter). • Constant inappropriate comments from management • Enthusiastic CEO attempts 10 new projects at a time, without auditing just how they will affect operations, or even if they are necessary. A CEO should be constantly busy, but needs to ensure his or her activities will actively help the company. • Off-putting management, no defined HR practices, and extremely unclear expectations lead many employees to question their performance. One to one check-ins outside of semi-annual reviews are unheard of, and "development conversations" are often impromptu, and normally consist of management lashing out at employees for completely unforeseen, often factually untrue reasons. • Employee turnover can ratchet up the workload on those remaining with essentially no warning. Attempts to hire new employees are very often unsuccessful, leading to consistently unsustainable workloads with no incentive for employees to sustain them. • All coders are overseas. All 3 of them. If you need technical help beyond the in-house's skill-set, good luck. Many team members are skilled, but the company desperately needs an experienced CEO and COO to ensure they can work together smoothly to help clients accomplish goals. As is, the internal and external processes are incredibly broken, and due to the nature of leadership, unlikely to be fixed. Sheryl Sandberg said "If you’re offered a seat on a rocket ship, you don’t ask what seat. You just get on." OneIMS is exactly the opposite. So if you're considering taking a seat on this slowly-sinking 19th-century era steamship, presumably because you don't have many other options, at least go in with your eyes open.