Worst NGO you could possibly work for - Program Manager Population Services International Employee Review

Pay is an absolute insult. Those who started at PSI in its heyday are the folks who get promoted to Director of [random new department that does nothing] or VP on a given Tuesday, but PSI “can’t afford” offer junior/ newly mid-level staff a living wage for DC. The number of staff that have second or third jobs is exorbitant. My favorite part of the year is when the director, excuse me I mean VP, sends an email encouraging us to fill out our time sheet with our “true” hours worked. PSI works people to death. Burnout is real. The two people at PSI who basically took it upon themselves to keep morale up left with no jobs lined up. That should tell you something. · Bureaucracy! You can’t get anything done without passing it through 50 people to “chime in”. We get nowhere because everyone wants to be involved but no one wants to push it to the finish line. They just complain and/or spend 4 months saying they’ll read it, get to it a year later and then decide we should go in a completely different direction. This is why we go nowhere. · PSI is racist, xenophobic, and patriarchal, and it’s time that this is called out and addressed. There’s a particular department where most of their junior-newly mid-level staff were people of color and guess what… they’ve all left due to the covert and blatant racism within the department and organization. One intern in particular said “PSI is not a place for women of color” when she left which was painful to hear because the whole point of this DISGRACE of an organization is to empower women of color, yet the ones working here have to leave because it's RACIST and their mental health is at stake. White privilege is so rampant here and that’s probably why the one time we got a black C-Suite member (who we all LOVED) she ran out of here in less than 4 months. They just wanted her to clean up the mess they had made. People of color here get paid less than everyone else in their position or the ones who start with less experience and/or education. Their ideas aren’t heard. They’re looked over constantly and told to wait indefinitely for opportunities that white staff just demand and receive. They can’t advocate for themselves without their team saying they’re “angry” “aggressive” “bringing down the vibe”, etc. And worst of all, they’re only brought into the room when a donor is visiting and it’s glaringly obvious that their team is completely white. I can’t even call out a department here but it’s ALL of them that do this! Then they disguise it as an opportunity for you to grow meanwhile they’ve shot down all of your requests for real professional development all year. POCs at PSI are tokens and that’s it. · The silos make it hard to work in-country and on the PMTs (regional HQ teams). Certain projects (cough cough FP) REFUSE to understand that they are NOT THE ONLY PROJECT these countries have and impose insane deadlines and timelines as if they pay for 100% of our time. Then their teams send passive aggressive or just plain INSULTING emails to PMTs and country staff, call us incompetent behind our backs and chastise our in-country staff for not understanding their kindergarten level, google translate French and Spanish. Or they get upset when no one in-country wants to participate in their silly extracurricular “initiatives” and “challenges” they do to keep themselves busy because they dump all the REAL work on the PMTs. PMTs get no contact with the donor but we’re chastised when our funding gets cut or bids don’t get won but the teams who actually work directly with the donor are consoled by their directors when they can’t even perform simple stakeholder engagement. · Management is so bad it’s scary. Managers are evaluated without input from their supervisees. 50% of your job is to supervise someone and yet that person isn’t included in evaluations – ridiculous. How does that contribute to building capacity? How does that support any staff? Just because someone has the title of manager it does not mean that they are a good manager. We just started a year-long program called “Great Manager’s Training” that is completely useless. It takes a year to figure out that you shouldn't bully your staff? Sr level managers (several who have already taken this training) berate and scream at their staff and give opportunities to only the people who kiss up to them or ignore the abuse. Newly minted managers treat their interns and program assistants like their house-keepers/personal secretaries and as a manager myself it’s so sad to watch. If your manager wants you out, they will find a way to put you on a performance improvement plan (PIP)—which heads up is PSI’s way of kicking you out, but legally. (Looking at you WCA/Global Fund Unit! The fact that people can count how many people of color you’ve bullied and pushed out of your department alone, you should be ashamed). Want a promotion? Get in line. If your manager doesn’t like you, you’re screwed. If your manager likes you but doesn’t want to advocate for you. You’re screwed. If your manager likes you, but no one likes your manager… You’re screwed. Think it’s a good idea to go to HR? Ha! Anything that involves HR is pure unfiltered trash. So yes ladies, gents, and non-binaries you’re ... you guessed it … SCREWED. There are also certain managers who don’t want you to grow before they do, so they stifle your opportunities. · A number of senior level people are paid 100K+ to work remotely in low cost of living cities as we struggle to keep our head above water in DC with wages for people with masters starting at 40K. Interns to APMs are often running out of work by 4:45pm to make their next shift at some bar, restaurant, yoga studio, etc. But will be online at 10pm to continue working on things way above their pay grade. As a PM, I try to advocate for my junior staff but conversations with HR go nowhere. I've even had to help another staff find a higher paying job because they couldn't afford cost of living. · PSI loves the word “strategy” and does not understand what this entails. We have a new one every week. We spend months throwing buzz words and spend 1000s of dollars sending people abroad to roll out the new strategy of the month that no one understands. People that have no sense of cultural competency and yell at field staff or don't even know how to communicate with "those people" (as they say). They say that the countries are always behind, but HQ never involves them in anything, nothing is ever translated into their languages (especially our Portuguese staff) and instead of the 3 year roll out process at HQ, country staff get a 3 day workshop with a facilitator that has a 1st grade understanding of Spanish/French, an hour Skype for Business phone call where the first 59 minutes we're trying to connect, and an email that promises more information about the "strategy" that will never come. But the problem is definitely "them" being difficult not HQ, right? The xenophobia is striking. · They have entire project teams serving Africa, Asia, and LAC with NO team members who are African, Asian, or Latinx. And when they do have them, they fly out the door after they realize what kind of place PSI is). As a POC, if you speak up or have an opinion you are considered aggressive. If a white person does it, it’s more “Jane has so much initiative! What an asset to the team.” If a POC questions anything or advocates for anything they are “too direct”, “childish”, or “emotional” even. They even have to apologize to white staff for their white tears. But when a white person does it and is even seen among other staff as being rude or condescending, senior staff see it as “Adam is a leader… haha he’s so blunt and direct but that’s just his nature!” · Work life balance does not exist and is looked down upon. Unless you’re a director/VP because they’re on vacation 6 months out of the year. Oops, I mean “speaking” at a “conference”. · PSI rolled out a salary matrix almost 2 years ago and HR still can’t explain it. They claim that they do equity reviews to ensure equality across gender and individual experience but they pick the lowest starting number for every position. (Except if you are male.) There is no negotiation…unless you have a manager that is willing to fight for you, but as I mentioned before that is usually never the case. · If you decide to work at PSI, after a couple months the initial excitement disappears because you realize there is no sense of knowledge management. You are basically starting from scratch. There is inadequate training, superficial introductory meetings and no follow up. All the turn over isn’t helping either. Every week there is a ridiculously cringy email of someone thanking PSI for their time (read: burn out) and to please keep in touch (No thanks.)