Decent work, good colleagues, kind of a dinosaur - Senior Study Director Westat Employee Review

The offices are incredibly depressing and out of date. Having worked in other companies that compete with westat, I can definitely say that it makes a huge difference when the office is bright and colorful and has decent coffee and cold water. And when they provide things like standing desks. When you work at a place like that, you feel valued. Back to the beverage situation: they offer filtered water but it's lukewarm. There is one ice machine in the whole campus. The coffee is dreadful. And this really should be a cheap and easy fix that could really improve morale, especially as we go back to the office. It's honestly like working in a government facility circa 1998. But even a lot of government agencies have remodeled since then. Census is like 3 miles of cubes in a giant imposing building but feels far less oppressive than Westat's terrible offices. I don't really like working from home, but it's much more preferable. This is a really good example of how things work, though. If you ask someone who's been there a long time (most people), they just kind of shrug because they're used to it. There's an overwhelming feeling of "this is the way things have always worked so this is the way we must do it".