8y
First off, I want to mention that I appreciate this review and find much of the criticism of the company truthful and valuable. It is my opinion, as a leader of a small business that's growing very quickly, feedback like this is going to help more than hurt us as we move forward.
I am glad to hear all the positive comments under the "Pros".
For most of the "Cons" I can tell you we are actively working to improve each item:
Leadership roles:
We are taking our time to make sure that the people in the decision making positions are the right players. We jumped too quickly into bringing too many to the table.
Passive Aggressive People:
I can't change the way others behave when it comes to conflict, but I am personally working on my own shortcomings when it comes to taking on issues directly.
Undefined Process:
I believe this is incorrect. The process is very well documented and defined, but the problem is that it's not being adhered to. Much of this comes from the challenges of a merger and transitioning a new team to a new way of working. It's a work in progress, for sure.
Accountability:
This goes back to leadership oversight and following process. If we're ok letting people go outside of process then we're failing at accountability. This is a great point that I am taking to heart.
Overworked:
Obviously I hate hearing this as I am someone who takes my family time very seriously. We do work very hard here and it's an entrepreneur-style environment. Just because I may work a lot of hours throughout the week doesn't mean I expect our team to match me. We are actively hiring more people to hopefully reduce the load.
I would also like to mention that the employees who take on side work have commonly been the ones I notice express discontent with work-life balance. We understand that designers and developers have opportunities to use their skills outside of our business and we have not made any rules against it, but with that flexibility should come a sense of responsibility about how that impacts your overall working experience.
Leadership only cares about Numbers:
We try to run as transparent of an organization as we can... and I believe that can sometimes have a negative effect. We run an open book company which means all of our financials are visible to the entire company. When you use that data to impact decisions and share that with the team it may be interpreted that it's all we care about. It isn't. And in fact, this was brought up to us as an issue and we are trying to adjust the way (and how often) we communicate the financials so that it doesn't seem like the only thing we are focused on.
Skip Steps:
Yes we do. It's a bad habit.
Underpaid:
I believe we pay fairly, but we are typically under market when compared to other companies (not agencies). The solution starts with more sales and higher efficiency when it comes to delivery. That's not something I can change overnight. So until then, we like to get our team involved in how we think we can improve things and I assume it will lead to better pay for everyone.
Things Get Progressively Worse:
The only things I can't agree with in the list, at all.
We are an iterative business that experiments with how to make our organization better. When something doesn't work, we change it. It may not be the right way the first time or the next 10 times after that, but we can't afford not to try without optimistically hoping that our attempt won't help us move toward being a better company. We actively request input from our employees and customers to help us improve everyone's experience.