Pros
-Good Work Life Balance -Generous PTO -Summer Fridays + December half days -Have found in general people like co-workers -Opportunity for advancement and moves between departments -401K is generous but only vests after 2 years
Cons
COVID response -Senior leadership claims to be implementing "modern workplace" when in actuality we are expected to come into office 4 days a week with little accommodation for personal life circumstances. I like the people I work with so I do enjoying coming in the office, but forcing everyone to do so when employees are nervous about getting sick and offering no empathy or compassion for the situation just creates resentment and distrust -Mgt has been insisting employees come into office since Summer 2020 (height of pandemic) and is implementing 4 days a week for +80% capacity starting August 2021. Have to present doctor's note to be exempt from coming in. -Messaging around working in-person has been "It's our competitive advantage" yet we have been #1 in many of our categories while working remotely and we can see our peer companies have been doing just fine running their businesses with remote corporate offices -Communication about return to office has been incredibly disjointed. We were told we would be remote Thanksgiving through early January. However, as cases increased in Chicago in November and we kept receiving emails about postitive cases in office, leadership remained silent and only moved up remote period by three days, ie. Friday before Thanksgiving instead of Wednesday. Leadership prided themselves on "giving us 2 weeks notice" before any return to office but then in January, when realized holidays cases were still peaking when planned to bring us back in, SLT would send out end of day Friday emails letting us know whether or not we should come in the next business day (Monday). This was completely insensitive to the fact employees with kids needed to figure out last minute childcare and some employees were out of state for holidays and would need to keep reworking airplane tickets as the company gave last minute guidance on reopening. For reference, Nestle employees got 90 days notice on reopening. -Leadership knows about these problems and how employees feel and has ignored them. An internal survey showed a majority of employees did not trust leadership or feel they could vocalize their opinions to leadership. There were team discussions on the results where most employees communicated the responses were directly connected to the organization's COVID response and yet SLT still thought it was a good idea to bring us back in August with no-social distancing well before any of our peers and kept up the last minute communication (ie email sent 9-minutes before close of business day that the start of 4-days in office would be moved out a week) and are still offering zero flexibility D&I: this seems to have improved over the last 6 months. The organization has communicated new recruitment strategies and hiring/promotion initiatives to get more POC and women into the organization and leadership roles. But then again, a D&I director was hired in 2020 who left after less than a year at CAG and a lot of the talent I've seen leave the organization have been women and POC.
