Pros
-Most employees are extremely passionate about the work and art form; -The current GD is focused on company culture and engagement and sees it as a priority to address (but see con below); -The company typically provides 2 weeks PTO during the winter holiday in addition to existing holidays and vacation plans; -Working in the opera house is magical; -The quality of the artistic product is excellent - the world's greatest singers appear on the SFO stage.
Cons
-As an org with multiple labor unions that represent a majority of the workforce (with the exception of the administration) there is a great deal of management vs. labor mentality. This is a given for most orgs with workforces that operate under collective bargaining agreements, but it certainly makes it challenging to achieve significant change and progress when those groups entire function is to ensure things don't change too fast. -While the GD is focused on addressing company culture challenges, their approach has been to address it across the board in one-fell swoop to address all the various workforce groups (admin, orchestra, chorus, dancers, crew, house staff, etc.) but each of those groups have their own separate challenges that can only be addressed by focusing on each group individually. For example, some of the admin challenges are related to career advancement and mentorship, which is not necessarily a challenge seen in the labor groups whose main challenges are coming to the table to acknowledge the significant challenges facing the org and industry and what it will take to address that collectively within their individual groups. By trying to address the issues as a collective "we" across the org, it fails to truly get to the issues of each individual area and just ends up being a series of company parties to make people feel good - which is certainly important, but is not the critical culture work that needs to be done at the org. -The org is extremely siloed - some departments may never even interact or know what the other department does, even though the admin team is only around 100 individuals. You'll often find out that another department is trying to address a challenge/problem your own department is trying to address but on their own, so there is a lot of crossed-hairs and doubling up on work. Each department is overseen by a different leadership team member (MD) and how each MD managed their areas and shared info was never consistent -- some would share every major development and some would share nothing and you'd need to hear about it from another colleague in another department. Sometimes that info was critical to your job function, so not getting that info through the proper channels made company communications extremely challenging and sometimes toxic. -The leadership team operated on a consensus basis rather than a consent basis and often decisions would take considerable time to be considered and made, which was frustrating for many on the ground who sometimes needed to move quickly and were not empowered to make the decisions themselves, even though it may be minimal in scale in terms of impact or budget. Because so much needed to be decided at the leadership team level, there was always a backlog and so opportunities were often missed because it couldn't be decided in an appropriate amount of time. -The lack of advancement and growth is deeply felt throughout the org. While the org does typically hire for new roles from within, that is typically the only way to advance at the org so if you're in a role that you love but would like to grow into a leadership role it is impossible, unless you have the back of someone on the leadership team who will champion you. It doesn't have the infrastructure to promote or acknowledge employees in a way that provides growth, especially those who have been with the company for a long time.