The things that happened at this office would make a great TV Show, but a terrible real life experience - Anonymous employee CDK Global Employee Review

Every rose has its thorns, but in CDK’s case, it’s more like an iceberg with a fun little flag on the tip, and below is the rest of the iceberg wrapped in barbed wire, electrified, with the Titanic dragged under the water and stuck there as tortured souls scream at you to get out while you still can. I’m sorry I didn’t listen, Leo. Let me take you on a journey. When I started at CDK, it all seemed really cool. The location is great, and we’re on the 28th and 29th floors, which makes for great snapchats. The people also seemed really nice, and there were people I got along with right away and are still my friends, even though they’ve moved to better things. It was even fun the first couple of weeks in training, because I had the freedom to be creative while learning the very specific in-house platform that we use. Things started to fall apart when I really got out of training and into the actual work. The way the amount of work done is measured is incredibly skewed. You can work on a case where you create 16 graphics for a dealer’s website and spend the time to make them look really nice and get the same amount of credit as someone who checked a box on a website. Since there’s no way to get credit for actual good work that you put a lot of time into, and you can actually get punished for not doing enough cases, most people here just pick out the easy cases or put in the bare minimum effort to get it done. This is not a comment on the work ethic of my team, but rather management’s incompetence and inability to recognize or incentivize quality work. A lot of people here were hired in on contract (why treat people well and give them benefits when you can get a no obligation test drive, amirite?) with the promise that there was a “high likelihood of converting to permanent full time CDK positions”, but that’s a lie. The real way to get hired on was to go to lunch with and make breakfast for the manager that had the most pull with upper management. You could also get it by telling this manager very personal details about your life and making her feel bad for you, but if you refused to reveal your life story, you were blacklisted. You may think this is an exaggeration, but I assure you, it’s 100% true. This kind of blatant nepotism has caused terrible employees who have no idea what good design is, no idea how our platform actually works, and who regularly fall asleep at their desks to move up in the company. The worst part is, upper management watched this happen and, while they always said they would try to make things better, did nothing to actually address these issues. Speaking of management, none of the managers know what our department actually does. The managers we have come from different places within the company, which would have been a good idea if there were at least one manager for the content team that actually had experience working on the content team. Instead, we’re forced constantly forced to explain why our problems are actual problems and why we can’t make 16 good slides and upload them all to a dealer’s website in 30 minutes, which is then communicated to upper management, like some inefficient, dystopian game of telephone. Upper management then either completely forgets what they’re told or doesn’t care, and gets upset at middle management when not enough cases are done, making middle management put more pressure on us. If there were just one (1) person on any management team who knew what a PSD is, I think this problem could have been avoided. On top of not getting credit for good work and management not knowing what we do, our team in India often produces poor quality work, if they can even interpret the request. This isn’t entirely their fault, since other departments or dealers often send in cases with instructions that are unclear, don’t provide all the information, or are just completely illegible. TCS gets trash, produces trash, and then we are obligated to fix it. This constant stream of mistakes and drop in quality has made dealers, GM, and CDK employees absolutely livid, and I honestly can’t imagine anyone in upper management truly believing TCS would be a good thing for the company when they cannot reach out for more information, and when there is no expectation for other departments to do quality work. While I’m on the subject of other departments, let me take a moment to tell you about that whole mess. When I signed on for this role, my job was to grab a case, reach out to the Account Advocate if any clarification was needed, and close it. Over the past year, I feel as though many of the duties of other departments have been pushed onto us. For example, Advocates have asked myself and multiple team members to reach out to the dealers for information. This is not our job, and we shouldn’t be expected to do the jobs of other departments. Still, we are often told to do things like this anyway because it provides a “good customer experience”. That would be all fine and dandy if TCS weren’t consistently providing a terrible customer experience and suffers (seemingly) no consequences. Now that I am about 900 words into this review, you may think I’m done, but no! Let me take some time to tell you about the door. There’s a disabled employee in the office, and since CDK couldn’t find a way to weasel out of ADA compliancy, they had to put a button on one of the office doors so it would open. They delivered on the button after a couple months, but that door still doesn’t work properly. It will almost never open on the first try, and sometimes won’t even open at all. It broke constantly for months, and apparently no one could figure out why. How many CDK employees does it take to fix a door? We still don’t know. I think I’ve now gone over every terrible thing everyone else has covered, but there’s something I haven’t seen on here yet; the microwave incident. A couple months back, we noticed there was smoke coming from the kitchen, and we soon realized that the microwave was literally on fire. Instead of evacuating everyone like a normal, ethical company would do, we had to take it upon ourselves to get out of the building. When we came back in, we were told everything was fine and to continue work as usual. We could have worked from home to minimize the possibility of inhaling dangerous fumes, or taken a half day, but no. I don’t even recall it being actually addressed by management. This isn’t the only time employee safety was blatantly ignored, but it’s one that hasn’t been mentioned. Overall, this company only cares about cutting costs, at any cost to employee well being or basic human decency. This place was spiraling towards the ground when I started, and now it has hit the ground and began drilling into the earth. I would honestly pay to see the day they hit that molten core and burst into flames, because it’s coming soon.