Lack of respect towards employees - Research Associate II CoStar Group Employee Review

1.0
Dec 29, 2014
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Free health snacks, nice office, good health insurance plan, young staff (but when they get together all they do is complain about the job)

Cons

low pay, intense micromanagement, no company vision or direction, you are entirely replaceable, no room for creativity, serious lack of common sense from upper management, promotions are a complete joke (unless you move up to management which is less than likely), general sense of unease/fear amongst employees, low morale, weak sense of corporate loyalty, poor bonus structure (it changes all the time and the goals are unobtainable), heavy focus on arbitrary metrics

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CoStar Group Response
11y
Thank you for your feedback, and I’m sorry to hear you did not have a pleasant experience – we value all of our researchers, and no one should feel replaceable in their position. Research is at the core of what we do. In order to collect the most comprehensive, accurate real-time information, we have to keep in in direct contact with all the people necessary to keep our information the industry standard – from the top brokers and owners to mom-and-pop investors and tenants. It’s that direct contact that makes our information and products superior to our competitors, and that is how we have managed to set the industry standard. While I don’t know your individual bonus situation, CoStar Group makes a point to reward our hard-working researchers with the additional compensation they deserve based on their performance. Quarterly bonuses in Research are structured so all researchers receive a bonus unless they have either just come out of training, or are on a formal corrective action plan. The bonus amount is determined by the researcher’s manager and is based on performance. Recently we have moved away from strictly metrics-based evaluations of daily work and now we encourage our managers to look at the quality of work and effort put in by their researchers when considering bonus amounts. Bonuses do not start at specific amounts that are lowered for not meeting a certain goal – the overall amount is determined after the close of each quarter to take the overall quality of the researcher’s work into account. As with any other job, the role of a researcher isn’t for everyone, but we want all our employees to excel at CoStar Group. It’s true that there aren’t managerial roles opening up all the time for potential promotions (though more research managers are promoted internally than hired externally), but we also encourage our employees to look at the whole of CoStar Group to further their career – many of the employees who have long been in Sales, Human Resources, Accounting and other departments started out in Research. Research had over 300 promotions in 2014, and among those were new roles created in the last year to provide researchers with the ability to specialize on a specific topic and become an expert source of information.

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