People are great, Publicis management not so much - Senior Data Analyst Epsilon Employee Review

Publicis management does not care about its employees. Epsilon was acquired by Publicis in July 2019 and company culture changed. 401k matching dropped from 5% with no vesting period to 4% with a 4 YEAR vesting period (1% per year). When the pandemic hit they announced that they were deferring raises for 6 months, including people who received promotions. To be fair the executives said they would take a 30% pay cut in "solidarity". After 6 months they deferred raises for an additional 2 months (even though management salaries went back up to 100%). In the same 8 months Epsilon was dominating. My division, Digital Advertising (Conversant), in particular was breaking impression-serving and revenue records in June which is typically our off season and a lot of people left so we were all doing more work for the same amount of pay as the year prior (technically less if you factor in inflation). Even before the pandemic most employees were being paid rates that were below industry standards so deferring raises was just a slap in the face, especially for those who were promoted. On top of everything else Publicis INCREASED their stock dividend from 1.15 EUR to 2 EUR, giving money to the shareholders who did nothing for the company instead of giving it to the people who worked hard to earn that money. Multiply that 2 EUR by the almost 248m shares of Publicis stock and it works out to over 495m EUR or nearly $600m USD when the dividend was issued on June 15th 2021. That's enough to give every Publicis employee over $7,500 or $10,000 if you only count the employees that stayed for all of 2020. Publicis will never give that money to the employees because Artur's (2m EUR!) bonus is based, no joke, on stock performance. Not company performance but how well the stock does. There is zero incentive for Publicis to pay a cent over the bare minimum.