The work environment at EAB is absolutely toxic. It’s a picturesque study of toxic silicon valley startup culture, and has only gotten worse over the last several years since the split from ABC. Here are some examples -
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- Severely Disconnected Organization:
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- There is a significant disconnect between different functional areas and no clear "decision maker" within a given team. basically a verticals structure to an extreme. this means you sometimes have to beg people just to do their job and accountability within certain teams was lacking, making it hard to get things done efficiently
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- Blatant unethical sales tactics, such as promising features that had not been built, intentionally writing ambiguous contracts, and “forgetting” what was exactly was offered. The commission to bring in business is not offset by the statistically significant low production adoption rates and poor QA on the products delivered. Clients often are very unhappy with EAB and spend years trying to drop the services.
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- People have a very hard time identifying what is expected of them, but the strong cross-team siloing causes people to think it involves “everything.” This creates a general undercurrent of panic and stress to permeate the environment at all times.
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- Persons in research have absolutely no idea what persons in technology do, and vise versa. Then there’s the entire divide between the Richmond office and the DC office where neither can even tell you what the other half of the company does or what their products are. The right and left hands do not speak - nobody knows what is going on.
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- The general expectation around the office is that EAB intends to puff up it’s numbers and re-sell within the next 3 years to make executives even more money. They don’t seem to care that there were massive layoffs in the last turnover. As a note, the acquisition of the company could have been handled in a better and more transparent way so that they would not have had such a high attrition rate.
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- Who even is the CEO? We never hear from or see ANY leadership outside our immediate department. No idea what the company’s long term mission is, but we’ve certainly lost sight of it.
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- No Career Development or Mobility:
- Company business model is built on young talent, but doesn't put any effort into training or developing those employees. People are expected to fit into the cookie-cutter mold, focus on project turnover instead of project impact or quality, and often burn-out within 2 years.
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- Roles are very much based on appearance, age, and sex. Pretty, young, and outgoing women are placed first as consultants, “normal” person’s are placed as Business Analysts or researchers, and the “diversity hires” are always places away from clients in the technical positions. The clients themselves often notice and complain about this. As well, most employees state that they did not have insight into which role they were being placed into, and regret not having the opportunity to move into one that is more suited to their skills or interests.
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- People often complain that they are blocked when they try to laterally move into new roles in the company. If you do successfully switch teams, there is a penalty to your career progression if you switch teams. Usually it will reset your promotion cycles and add at least a year to your upward mobility.
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- No Work-Life Balance:
- Work-life balance is an oxymoron within EAB. You are allowed to leave at 5pm each day (in by 8:30), but you are expected to keep your work email on your phone and respond at all hours of each day. When you take PTO for a vacation, you are reprimanded if you do not respond to messages or emails. So, you may not be a “butt in seat,” but there is no actual work-life separation for an EAB employee.
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- No Diversity:
- Managers are given no actual guidance or management training. There is a new management training system in place, but it really has nothing to do with how to manage employees, handle performance reviews, or mitigate problematic situations instead it focuses on the company's bottom-line goals for each employee. Instead of “how can you make these people happy” the training is “how can you push them to get more out of them.”
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- Biased and Untrained Management:
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- There is extreme myopia among senior leaders who live in an echo chamber of ideas.
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- No employees or managers have industry experience within higher education.
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- There are almost no women or diversity in management, it’s almost entirely privileged white men. As such, the firm has a horribly difficult time maintaining diversity hires.
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- Promotions and work assignments are based off popularity among higher management instead of merit, skills, or interests. You are always put where the highest need is instead of where you’re most likely to fit, learn, or develop your skills.
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- You will often hear stories around the company where the people in leadership positions are considered to be “bullies” who use negative reinforcement to encourage productivity.
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- Credit is almost always attributed to the most popular team members. Even if someone heavily documents their work, merit is not as important as popularity to get good assignments or upward mobility. As such, credit is often stolen from the employees who have done the work, and attributed to the team member whom is most popular with management. This directly impacts performance reviews, promotion tracks, and upward mobility. The impact can be so severe, that the highest producing employees are seen as lazy and unproductive by upper management, and near zero producing employees are favored and untouchable.
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- Often employees have to double their work efforts to document their work and advocate for themselves as their managers will not do so for them. Middle management has learned that going against upper management, in terms of advocating and standing up for their team, leads to negative career impact, so they don’t bother to. This only increases the distrust employees have for any level of management inside the company, as management clearly only has their own personal best interests in mind.
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- Persons who are in established positions of popularity openly do not do work. There are persons who simply come into the office to gossip all day and persons who go full time remote and are almost entirely offline all day. It seems that everyone is aware that those persons do not do any work and everyone makes jokes about how they have the good life, but what is most alarming is that most of these people are in management positions so their employees feel completely abandoned when they actually need help. There needs to be a strict limit on the number of managers allowed to be remote, and some sort of “core business hours” for those managers with employees. In the same vein, if anyone raises issues about these persons not doing work, or raises the issue during promotion cycles, there is active retribution from management, as if you had just insulted their friend. It’s highly unprofessional.
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- Unless you want to play the popularity game, you best stay incognito and just get your work done. If you ever speak up against management you will become persona non-grata, and endangered.
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- Escalating risks or pointing out issues is a sure way to be fired.
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- No Confidential HR:
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- HR is almost illegally non-existent and unreachable. People who need work visas have lost their visas because EAB HR has not submitted the paperwork in time. People who are in situations such as harassment or a toxic/hostile work environment, often feel trapped because they do not trust “Career Management” not to fire them for being the squeaky wheel. Along the same lines, there is no true confidentiality in terms of discussions with “Career Management” - anything said in those discussions, even if it’s of a personal nature, will be office gossip by the end of the next workday, near guaranteeing management will hear and know who complained about them, often resulting in backlash. As well, there is no unbiased representative present during bi-annual “Career Committee” where employees are brought up like a Greek rush activity and gossiped about to determine if they should be promoted, receive a raise, or be fired. No tangible evidence is ever presented, words like “emotional” are often used, and the amount of sexism and preferential treatment that appears in these meetings is nothing short of horrifying.
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- Teams have been known to privately meet to compile anonymous team-wide lists of grievances for management. Then they anonymously submit those grievances to the next few levels of management in hopes nobody will receive backlash - I have seen this happen 3 times and I have never seen a positive outcome.
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- Extremely Poor Mental Health Support within Organization:
- Very common to walk into the women’s locker room or bathroom and hear sobbing from a stall.
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- The employees are almost all extremely unhappy and regularly quit for mental health purposes with nothing else lined up.
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- Mental health support is abhorrent. I’ve heard managers joke about how people are “emotional” or “nothing is really wrong” when persons are suffering from work related anxiety, stress, or major depressive disorder. Burnout is all too common, and not addressed at all.
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- Almost all employees who have been around longer than 3 years are leaving the firm in 2019. This is causing a massive culling of skilled employees and is leaving the ones who do no work or don’t know how to do the work. Directors describe themselves as at “wits end” as a result, but make no moves to actually address the escalated complaints of those tenured employees.
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- Low Pay and Poor Benefits:
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- Pay is substantially below market-rate for the same roles. EAB has gotten into trouble for this before and actually had to release company-wide raises to get within a standard deviation or two of market-rate pay bands for some roles.
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- Yes, people often say that the Richmond office unofficially bribed employees to write positive EAB reviews online after the Advisory Board/EAB split through Winter of 2018.
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- Some of the benefits like “healthy life hours” are all for show. If you attempt to take your “healthy life hours” you are actually expected to do them outside of business hours or flex that time back in.
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- The health insurance is laughably bad.
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- PTO is industry standard, but you are shamed if you use your PTO.
