Management- I have been through a handful of managers during my time here and will say that your manager will truly make your experience here at BF. There are some great managers, ones who have your back, who support you, and who you will truly enjoy working with. There are also managers who are managers simply because of who they know or due to their seniority and that can break it for your experience here. I believe Alan B. is trying to get management proper training but they aren’t interested in working with him, which is really frustrating for direct reports.
Another big issue with management is favoritism. This goes on everywhere, but in all the places I have worked, this place by far exhibits the most blatant display of favoritism I have ever witnessed. Promotions are given based on time with the company and which director you are friends with. If you are a favorite and you resign, you will be given more money to stay. If you are a favorite, you can work remotely and spend your time running errands, working out and playing with your kids. You’ll be given less work. I have worked at 5 other professional companies and have never witnessed such undisguised preferential treatment of employees.
Benefits/Salary- The benefits are very expensive if you have a family. We have countless insurance carriers at our disposal that we could negotiate great rates with, yet we don’t. The 401K matching is just okay and there are no bonuses or great merit increases in place to reward you for those (very) long hours you put in. Salaries are all over the board, with people performing the same job making $30k difference. New hires are paid far more than those who have been carrying the company on their backs for years. The compensation director has done a great job of bringing in new hires at fair market value, but doesn’t seem to care about those who have put in their time with the company, as salaries have not been structured by pay grade, as he stated he would do when he came on board.
The jobs- if you are client facing, you will hate your job. In all the years of my jobs in client facing roles, I have never worked in such a hostile environment where they are concerned. I get that they are rightfully frustrated at times, the software doesn’t function correctly, files are incorrect or late, things happen, but many of the clients I have are downright volatile and will hold you (as the client facing person) personally responsible for everything that happens. Day in and day out, I get chastised for things that are beyond my control and BF simply is unable to give us the resources to properly handle all of these situations. The CSM role that is supposed to be “relationship management” and “project management” is nothing more than a firefighting verbal punching bag of a role. The Ben Admins are verbally assaulted daily by those frustrated by either their lack of understanding of how to enroll in benefits or because they don’t have proper ability to use the enrollment system. Testing Managers and Project Managers are treated poorly due to promises made by sales that we simply cannot deliver.
Which brings me to my next point- global. It is inevitable that we need to outsource SOME jobs, but the level of incompetency we deal with overseas is astounding. It’s not their fault- they have a language barrier, in conjunction with broken and undocumented processes, dysfunctional software and lack of training, to overcome. It’s a lose-lose situation for everyone (stateside employees, global employees and clients.)
The software seems to have been designed by middle-career level engineers. It’s a solid product from the design perspective, however, as the years have gone on, we have continuously found holes and have stayed afloat with releases and patches that put bandaids over them. We also release new features continuously, without fixing old issues, which causes a snowball effect of… you guessed it… more issues! We are now so far into this that we need a team of top notch engineers to come in and redesign the entire system. No holes, no shortcuts. It’s likely impossible to get those engineers because we want to pay them “Charleston salaries” so why would they bother? The software is not intuitive to use and those of us who are client facing and in the system daily know of the many manual workarounds that we must perform daily just to keep the business running.
And last, but not least, I really dislike how your “dedication” is measured by the amount of hours you put in here. We use a time tracking system (the dreaded replicon, now replaced by the even more dreadful netsuite) and management looks at that weekly to see how many hours you are putting in. It’s sad when you have a week where you put in under 60 hours and you are made to feel that you are underutilized.
