Pros
- Flexible work (location, schedule, etc.), but this is offset by the high volume of work (weekend + late night or early morning work is the norm for many if not most). - Sharp colleagues, extremely smart and highly skilled employees. - Decent financial compensation, but the rest of their benefits package stinks (more below). - Interesting work, projects, tasks, and client interactions.
Cons
- Where do I begin? Easily the most frustrating workplace I have ever experienced. The main reason why is because the company presents itself as a socially oriented enterprise that is staff driven when this couldn’t be further from the truth. Yes, we are employee owned and that translates into a nice retirement perk (employee stock ownership plan - ESOP). But beyond that there is nothing socially oriented about the company. It is a research services (and increasingly health data/tech services) company that is focused on processing as many contracts as efficiently as possible to maximize profits. Anything that is not consistent with that priority and that does not contribute to the ‘bottom line’ is a non-starter. - Staff are constantly bombarded with internal communications that feel more like some empty PR campaign about how socially oriented the company is, how it is such a great place to work, how we have an ESOP, as well as core values and fundamentals. But there are MAJOR issues that leadership refuses to address or even acknowledge (more on this below). - HR is openly hostile towards staff and there is no true space for open and free dialogue. HR informs staff who ask questions that they can no longer do so in company wide forums. Staff who raise issues are silenced by HR, their supervisors, or other senior staff in their respective unit. This is because appearances are paramount and any reasons for staff to chatter among themselves must be squashed immediately. All information is top down and on a “need to know basis,” which is funny because often supervisors themselves are not sufficiently informed or empowered to answer staff’s questions. Staff resort to communicating with each other about the company on encrypted/secure channels to share information. This has become particularly valuable over the last year as the company has engaged in a process of backdoor layoffs, encouraging select staff to find other employment by forcing them to part time work or transferring them across units against their will. - The overall compensation package is mediocre, despite a decent salary and the ESOP. There is ZERO sick leave, paid time off is NOT generous (not all federal holidays are days off despite primarily being a federal contractor), especially in light of the lack of sick leave and federal holidays, and the parental/maternity/paternity leave is simply abysmal (6 weeks fully paid after 6-8 weeks of short term disability paid at 66%). This is ironic to me given the strong evidence that exists about the importance of rest and non-overworking for both health and productivity…Junior staff (associates and analysts) do not receive annual bonuses but more senior staff do. The higher the level, the higher the % of annual salary that a senior staff member can receive as their bonus. So, the bonus structure is highly regressive and that is without knowing the % details for executive staff, as that information is not made available. - To meet profitability goals, staff are routinely pushed to complete tasks on rushed timelines and with inadequate budgets including not charging time in order to make sure that specific projects are as profitable as possible. Relatedly, staff are regularly asked to take on additional projects or tasks or proposals (business development) even if they are already over 100% time. These are all ways to make the work more efficient and profitable, at staff’s expense. As a result, many staff work around the clock, are overworked, and exhausted. Keeping staff this busy also helps ensure that they don’t ask too many questions…one has to ensure high billability and “utilization” rates at all times! - The above result in a highly inequitable workplace, which is of course not how the company presents itself publicly. It masquerades as if it is a diversity, equity, and inclusion champion when in reality it has a diversity, equity, and inclusion problem. Under-represented minorities are routinely subjected to a double burden of work and tend not to last as long at the company or climb as high or fast within the organization. This is, of course, tied to the fact that URM are over-represented as junior staff. The CEO, who is clueless, earns approximately $3 million dollars (roughly $2.4 million in base salary and a $650 thousand bonus last year). Meanwhile some entry level staff earn as little as $50 thousand, which is below a living wage in their locations like DC or Oakland. So, the ratio of CEO to entry level compensation is around 60x (3,000,000 / 50,000). This ratio is much worse if it is calculated for entry level jobs at EDI Global in Kenya - the company's subsidiary - that it has started outsourcing work through. Executives make closer to $250 to $400 thousand in base salary and received an average bonus of $66 thousand last year, though I understand the bonuses are much larger higher up in the executive class. In contrast, regular senior level staff who are eligible for bonuses receive approximately bonuses of $2 to $10 thousand. - There are no empowered employee groups inside the organization. Employee resource groups, the Employee Experience Council, and Employee Shareholder Committee are actively disempowered by leadership and typically ignored. They primarily exist for show and so leadership can claim that groups exist, but leadership does not engage them in any meaningful way. Earnest attempts to dialogue with leadership in groups are shot down (though leaders will always meet with any staff member 1-1 so that individual staff members can feel heard but then easily ignored). The Employee Shareholder Committee has no meaningful engagement with the Board of Directors who only engage with executives, which makes it easy to brush aside internal issues and make it look like everything is great and keep up high executive compensation and bonus levels. In either case, the current Board is toothless and operates as a rubber stamp for the CEO and his cronies who dutifully watch his back. The group of executives has grown substantially in recent years and continues to balloon, primarily via strategic hires that serve as YES-people to the CEO. The number and ratio of executives that actually lead or work in the “business units,” which carry out our core services, has not grown proportionately so the executive committee is primarily made up C-suite people who don’t really understand what we do or how we do it and it shows! The enterprise would benefit greatly from a labor union and collective bargaining. - All of the above contribute to a company that does great work on the outside but also practices systemic gaslighting on its own staff internally. As a previous review noted, it is a company that collects a lot of data on its own employees only to primarily ignore the data instead of using it to generate actionable insights that would strengthen the organization and make the vast majority of staff better off because that would require admitting mistakes and sharing more of the gains outside of the executive class. As such, the culture in some units and many teams is quite toxic - with staff who throw others under the bus to get ahead faster or staff who refuse to work on proposals unless they are bid on the project. There is a very passive aggressive texture to the culture where most staff are very polite in meetings but knives are out the rest of the time. This makes the work feel extremely pressured to many staff as there is no room for mistakes and one misstep or comment in front of the wrong person could quickly turn into an unpleasant and unnecessarily-complicated work engagement. - In summary, it is a company with a rich history and incredible capacities, that has been mis-managed and lost its way in the process of meeting business development, revenue, and profit targets. This is primarily because of leadership and an executive class that has setup a system to get rich off of regular staff while keeping them quiet. The previous generation of leaders at Mathematica who managed to buy the company out from Lockheed Martin in 1986 and build it into a titan of policy research wouldn’t even recognize it today. If things don’t change sooner than later, we will all be sadly reading an article about the downfall of Mathematica (like the one about Rand in AsteriskMag), lamenting what could have been!