- If you have a young family or plan to start a family, look for another employer.
- Appearance and perception are valued more than substance and quality in many contexts. Deliverable services stand out as an example of this.
- To further emphasize the value placed on appearance, money gets spent on admissions and PR (which in itself is not a bad thing). The issue comes when there is a lot of deferred maintenance on campus infrastructure that directly affects the quality of services delivered to students and the quality of life for employees. You can put lipstick on a pig, but that would not make me want to kiss it.
- The Board of Trustees get the “white glove” treatment while they are on campus. I understand the importance of their time on campus, but the fact that the people who make decisions for the college are so well insulated from most of the challenges that students and staff face on a daily basis is absurd to me.
- The disparity between job title/expectations and pay is clear. Even for education, wages in some areas could be increased.
- Security on campus is lacking. The security department has seen a lot of hiring and retention problems in the recent past. The new security director seems nice.
- Work from home policy (post pandemic) seems needlessly strict and also not fully or equally enforced.
- Overreach is a term that could be used in a lot of contexts.
- Some HR policies are not in alignment with generally accepted practices. Policy application seems to be inconsistent to me.
- Tuition reimbursement seems to be a tool for employee retention (requirement to stay a year or pay back tuition costs). Achieving a new degree typically does not result in increased pay, job title change, or anything that helps further the employee's career within the organization. Most who use the tuition benefit use it to find better opportunities outside of Geneva. Outside of this, it is a nice benefit for those who want it.
- The only method to get a raise that seems to work is threatening to leave or using other job offers as leverage. This is somewhat understandable with the organization’s tight budgets, but this is also why a lot of good people become bitter, and why some eventually leave.
- Leadership has trouble unifying departments across campus. Because of this there are major inefficiencies in communication and business processes. To their benefit, I will say it seems like leadership has worked on this, but I have not noticed any drastic progress yet. Hopefully, this continues to improve.
- Poor communication, late communication, and sometimes no communication is unfortunately the norm.
- People who are overworked are told to continue on because the college is a mission field. While sharing Christ with students is a high calling, it seems that the college’s mission is elevated to the point that it almost justifies poor employment circumstances. This certainly is not the intent, but I have seen the damage that Christian on Christian abuse “for the sake of the kingdom” causes and it’s a dangerous area that I personally would stay as far away from as possible. What I would like to see is an abundance of grace and blessing poured out on employees who struggle to make ends meet, or have trouble managing unrealistic workloads.
- A few months ago a review titled “Hard pass unless you want a ‘free’ degree” popped up. This caused a short lived buzz around campus and was brought to the attention of leadership by more than one individual. Leadership’s response was that they would assess and address items in that review that they were able to. To this date, I have not seen evidence of how any of those concerns were addressed. Further, they had to wonder if this was one person’s biased point of view, or if it was a summary of the general consensus of employee sentiment.. My personal experience leads me to believe it was the latter. Some major concerns were brought up but nothing has been addressed to employees about it. I would have liked a simple, “Hey, we hear your concern. We validate it. And we want to correct it.” For as small as this organization is, that kind of response would be appropriate.
- I once attended a meeting during the earlier stages of the pandemic where the president audibly laughed at his telling of a story of a student who left because the student believed the covid protocols were overreaching. It struck me as odd that a leader would laugh when a paying customer walks out the door.
- At the 2022 graduate commencement ceremony the president said something equivalent to “Geneva is a feasting school, so go and feast.” After which, graduates attended a reception of very cheap snacks that were left over from the undergraduate commencement earlier in the day. I think of this as a sort of metaphor.
