Pros
Nice property views, good Navy Yard location.
Cons
Do not take this role without knowing what you're actually signing up for. The job title of Conference Services Manager does not reflect the actual position. In practice, it's a Banquet Manager role wearing a Conference Services title.
You're expected to plan and detail every event on paper, then personally oversee and physically execute setup through breakdown on site, moving furniture and equipment yourself because there is no dependable banquet team. Staff is on call only, meaning there's no guarantee of help on any given event.
On top of that, it took a year before management would even consider bringing in outside staffing agencies to cover shortages, something that's standard practice across the events industry when you don't have enough in-house staff. That kind of basic operational knowledge seemed to be missing at the leadership level.
Despite doing the physical labor of a banquet role on top of full event planning, you're still held to standard 9-5 sales-team hours with no work-from-home flexibility, even though the job itself makes that schedule impossible to actually follow.
The equipment situation is bad and has been bad for a long time. Basic items like plates, silverware, cups, and glassware are consistently insufficient for the events being booked. Glassware in particular is a recurring problem: other departments have taken glassware from event storage, storage space itself has shrunk to almost nothing, and leadership has not implemented any real solution. Items just continue to go missing with no plan to track or replace them. I've had to walk the building floor by floor trying to piece together enough equipment for a single event, including trying to serve a 70 person event with roughly 20 glasses on hand.
You can easily have three to five events running concurrently, at the same time, on different floors, and there is no equipment to support that volume. Not extra staff, not extra plates or glassware, nothing. Despite this shortage being an ongoing, known issue, it has not been resolved.
Building infrastructure issues compound this. The hot water machine and coffee machine have been broken on certain floors for years, meaning you can only get hot water, coffee, or ice from specific floors, which is a real problem when you have events running across multiple floors at once. Rentals are occasionally approved but not reliably enough to fix the pattern.
This position has turned over multiple times, with each person leaving the role, and yet the job description has still not been rewritten to reflect what the responsibilities actually are. At this point, it seems reasonable to expect leadership to reevaluate the department structure and consider hiring for a Banquet Manager or Senior Banquet Manager title instead, one that actually matches the day-to-day work.
The workplace culture also has real issues. Leadership operates in a clique-like way, and I experienced ongoing gossip about former employees, including from senior leadership and HR, which normalizes unprofessional behavior throughout the property. This role specifically, and food and beverage in general, has high turnover, and having spoken with predecessors, this is a long-standing pattern, not a one-off.
In my experience, there was no real urgency to fix any of this. It felt like disorganization was just accepted as normal.
