This varies by department (some people seemed really happy), but my experience was downright horrific. There is zero work-life balance: you are expected to arrive early and your day will not end no matter how efficient you have been on your end. I was constantly stuck at the office waiting for coworkers to complete jobs and often received a lot of sass and spent an inordinate amount of time attempting to corral people into to doing their work despite not being their supervisor, or even working in the same department. That being said, everyone is overworked and client projects are sometimes shunted aside for trivial internal items such as the company Christmas card, which seems to take about 6 months (hence some of the delay by my coworkers.) You learn not to make happy hour or dinner plans with anyone before 9pm.
Expectations for employees are unrealistic and borderline crazy (think the Devil Wears Prada.) Despite coming from a large operation with lots of contacts in the area and professional experience, I was treated like a complete noob until they assessed I was fit to work in their mold. I don't think they let anyone outside the company know I existed for the first 3 weeks and even after that the level of work they started me out with was demeaning for my position.
Once I was finally allowed to communicate with the outside world, I was practically crucified for once typing "please let me know if you have any questions" in an email instead of "please let US know" - they felt the former was not communicating that the agency was a team environment and the attitude is that they do not want clients attached to any ONE person - everything goes through everyone.
Energy goes into unimportant things like memorizing and purchasing each client's favorite soda - God help me the day someone dared asked for caffeine free diet coke in a meeting when all I had was regular diet coke, and organizing email addresses in hierarchical order in the "to:" field before sending them. I was once even told to bring two outfits (a suit, and one with jeans) to wear for a meeting because on a previous visit, that particular client had made a comment that he "thought the office was a casual, so why were we all wearing suits?" When I jokingly asked my boss which outfit I should show up in, and if we were supposed to have a bat signal that meant "run and change" when the client arrived, he did not see the humor in it.
You need to be FAST. All client emails need to be answered very quickly and one day I made the mistake of trying to go pick up lunch - I received 60 emails in 30 minutes and had to rush back to stem the flow of my rapidly filling inbox. (There were no issues or fires, just your standard workflow.) Another time I tried to meet my husband for lunch and I had to run back to the office in the middle to send something out for my boss that just couldn't wait (the items are on a server you can't access from your phone) who was OOO. You become one of those crazy people who cannot be separated from their phone - even just for a lunch break.
Yet another day I ended up in the emergency room and called my coworker to give her an update that I was in the hospital, being administered morphine, and waiting on an MRI and would be out the rest of the day and possibly longer. Her snarky response? "Well can you at least forward me all of your emails with instructions on how to handle? Since you're just lying there." Upon my return she made fun of me for the extra characters in my instruction emails I had sent to her. Not that it wasn't inherently funny, but I was literally in the hospital on an IV full of morphine, and on the heels of such an unreasonable request what did they expect?!
Bottom line, we were worked to the bone at an intensity that quite frankly the pay (there is no overtime so once you start dividing your salary among the hours you are actually working it becomes pretty depressing), and cutesy Halloween parties did not make up for. Despite being offered a generous raise (at least percentage-wise...) at my first anniversary I left for another opportunity. The last two weeks were excruciating. Delivering the news to my boss was met with aggression, and my boss' boss refused to look me in the eye or address me for the remainder of my time in the office. No matter that I was supposedly a valued employee or that I had contributed a great deal (as my review and offered raise would suggest) - I was immediately deemed persona non grata.
I would not recommend working here unless you are very desperate. Like a step away from homelessness desperate.
