I’ve mentioned before that I occasionally visit www.glassdoor.com to read employee reviews (posted by both current and former employees) of companies in the reprographics business.
Most of the reviews I read, especially those posted by former employees, are quite mean-spirited.
Glassdoor provides a forum for employees to post comments about their employers. The question I have is….. is glassdoor’s forum fair to employers? Should not glassdoor allow employers to respond to comments posted about them? I travel quite a bit, and, from time to time, use TripAdvisor.com to research hotel ratings and reviews. Travelers post reviews, some are negative, some are positive. Hotels are allowed to post comments about a review. Should not glassdoor allow employers to respond to comments about them?
Here’s a very recent “former” (and an apparently disgruntled one at that) ABC Imaging employee’s review of ABC:
Review posted on glassdoor.com on October 17, 2011
Postion: ABC Imaging FM Engineer in Washington, DC: (Past Employee - 2009)
“Can Gain a lot of experience fast but it is a Horrible, Horrible, Horrible Place to work”
Pros
If you work in IT you pretty much get thrown to the wolves fast and you get to learn a lot in the process. They have a lot of under appreciated great workers. You can gain a lot of experience with printers/servers really fast, but you will have to learn on your own
Cons
Well this is going to be a much more expansive list than the Pros. Most importantly there are a lot of incredible people that have been working for a while, but instead of appreciating these people they are taken advantage of over worked, way under paid and under appreciated. When I was there we would regularly work 80 to over 100 hours a week and receive no overtime bonus or even a pat on the back. There is a lot of travel involved, but they make the travel as miserable as possible. They only give you 40 dollars a day to spend in New York, LA or Kansas City. If you end up driving your own car they only pay 30 cents a mile (That is if they ever pay you). They will not pay for rental cars even if one is necessary and turning in expense reports is such a chore that I have known people to eat the cost rather than to just turn it in. When I was there they constantly hired people who didn't understand the business to manage positions that they knew nothing about rather than hiring from within. There was one year where I went through 4 Managers and each one was worse than the next. Finally they had someone working production managing the IT department. That was the last straw for me. Benefits are non-existent. If you have a family you have to pay over 1000 (that's over a thousand) out of pocket for just insurance. Many people in the company don't even make that much a month. The owner has a bill of rights that states that the company answer is always yes to client demands, but at the same time the owner and management tell the workers that they need to to convince the client what they should want. If that doesn't make sense to you I thought the same thing the first time I heard it. The ownership and management are big believers in one-sided loyalty. All employees must remain loyal to the company while management and the ownership cut pay by 7 % indiscriminately lay people off, treat people like dirt, and hire people from outside with no experience in the industry to tell the people that have been keeping the company going how things should be done. Forgot to mention that the company had to cut pay during hard economic times for all employees, but at the same time they had money to open up offices in Denver and Philadelphia which were bound to lose money on top of all of the money that would have to be dumped in to purchase the new shops.
Advice to Senior Management
Wake UP!!!
I would ask management to think about how many talented hard working loyal employees have to leave before you realize you can't treat everyone like dirt and expect the world out of them. There has to be some give and take and not all take and no give.
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Joel’s further comment:
My advice to employees who do not like working for an employer is very simple - leave and get a job somewhere else!
I have several friends who work for ABC Imaging and who have worked for ABC Imaging for more than 10 years, some for more than 20 years. If they are still working at ABC Imaging, could ABC Imaging really be as bad a place to work as the glassdoor poster said?
Posts
A blog-visitor who goes by the tag “BigRed” submitted a comment to this post that I chose not to publish in its entirety, and that’s because his/her comment bashed specific (named) ABC management team members, something I felt unfair.
ReplyDeleteBelow, I’ve placed a portion of his/her comments – the portion of his/her comments that I think is fair to post on this blog.
“For one, It sounds as if you are a member of the hate on employee's club. People work there because it is a tight economy not because they enjoy being belittled on a daily basis. I worked there for a number of years before a change in upper management was made..,..”
My response to this person’s comment that I’m a member of the “hate on employees club.” Think whatever you want to think about me. As a former manager at two different companies, I was always very concerned about the team members who worked for our companies, no matter what positions they held, and I firmly believe that, if you talked to any of the team members I formerly worked with, they would tell you that I was an excellent people-person, that I cared very much about them, and that I never asked them to do anything that I, myself, was not willing to do. My mom and dad (may they R.I.P.) taught me the “golden rule” and I and my partners practiced that rule. Just to the opposite, I loved, rather than hated, the employees on our team and had a great deal of respect for their contributions to our companies.