Pros
1. Fellow Employees are very talented and are great to work with. 2. Gallup thinks/talks big and instills a lot of pride, in the beginning; around the impact one consultant can have within a client. “You can change the world.” 3. Nice office space. 4. Science behind approach. 5. Semi flexible schedules for those on the principal and partner side of the house. Not exactly true for operations. 6. Senior Partners are great managers and strategists but fail to pick up the leadership torch when it’s dropped or available.
Cons
1.Insecure and unqualified Leaders- 1. The Family is not qualified to lead Gallup.2. Gallup has again instructed employees not to read, talk or post things on Glass Door. 3. If an associate is not 100% engaged they are demoted until they quit or are fired outright. Engagement has turned into a witch hunt. A significant portion of employees don’t trust the confidentiality of the Q12 anymore and are not willing to share honest responses due to repercussions. 2.Healthcare Plan/Benefits are border line criminal. 3.Very little if any on boarding and absolutely no development. 4.Gallup operates similar to a bi-polar individual or maybe tri-polar is more accurate. You can break 99% of Gallup into 3 types of employees. Partners (Sales Guys), Principals (Thinkers/Doers) and Operations (Doers). Partners report to the CEO. Principals report to the COO. Operations report to the COO. The issue is the partners, principal and operations are not aligned, but the family thinks they are. 5.Careers- or lack thereof. A Principal/Partner Career at Gallup means being hired into a position which you will never be able to be promoted or transfer out of. 6.Quadrants of Excellence. Great in theory and has a number of great elements. Tries to focus performance on more than just selling more to clients and doing so with much higher margins, which was the basic business plan until the beginning of 2011. But as most companies are trying to remove subjectivity from performance ratings Gallup is trying to increase the subjectivity, which only means if the family likes you, you can get a larger portion of your bonus and a new title/pay raise. The amount of ambiguity is tremendous. The plan has been explained so many different ways it has lost all of its credibility. No one has any idea what to do to exceed expectations and achieve goals- other than log 2300 + hours. 7.Pay raises only come with new titles. When hiring in don’t expect or plan on yearly cost of living adjustments or pay raises. 8.Semi Flexible- but you need to have a set number of hours/week, 2300 hours a year and can’t work from home anymore. 9.Financial transparency has been eliminated. Which isn’t good or bad but it is interesting to point out that this only happened after Gallup had a “record year” and they turned around and gave the entire Principal organization 20% pay cuts and demoted the most senior principal. 10.Gallup Bosses- Gallup is over dependent on talent indicators and not on actual performance. Far too often people are put into Bosses roles without any prior experience and are now being asked to Boss teams in areas they know nothing about. 11.Lack of articulated values. Everything at Gallup revolves around getting to 1 Billion in sales. The number one focus isn’t associates, it isn’t clients and it isn’t just 2300 hours- the goal is trying to figure out how to get signatures on large contracts. Unfortunately only a handful of the sales guys know the “Gallup Science” and programs and most of the new guys are right out of school which makes them 25-30 years old. 12. Client Team changes due to turnover. Gallup’s approach to the client teams seem to be plug and play. If someone leaves- and turnover is very high now- Gallup just assigns someone else to the account and pretends nothing has happened. Any historical knowledge walks out the door and is replaced with a 20-30 year old. 13. Gallup doesn’t have a traditional consulting structure, single track, which Gallup argues is due to specific talent profiles. This means higher costs to do business with Gallup and usually a partner on the account who usually brings very little to no value to the client but adds costs to the account. At the end of the day this can’t really change though- how else is Gallup going to train a 25- 30 year old “Partner” unless they “work” on accounts and get some experience- this cost of course gets passed onto clients, with a healthy margin. 14.Pay Plans change every couple of years depending on the Family’s perception of who should be earning more or less. This last pay change, Jan. 2011, was just another pay cut and won’t be the last. Expect pay adjustments every 2 years or so with a negative outcome for most and no explanation. 15.ICE- Internal Customer Engagement- huge popularity contest. Stop the ICE madness!