The most opaque management I've worked with in my life. Decisions are made with no input from employees, entry to senior level, and management/HR staffers frequently ignore emails with serious questions or concerns. I can only speak to the I-140 side of the operation, but the entire company structure is a disaster. Writers are "graded" on their work, which in turn affects their total pay at the end of the month. Breaking past a metric that does not have a detrimental effect on one's salary now requires at least five if not ten or more hours of overtime per week. The grading system is also ridiculous on pragmatic and psychological levels. Most people taking this job are high achievers in the humanities and social sciences, and continuing to be graded on work rather than simply paid a salary and given quarterly performance reviews is immature, creates an anxious culture, and is completely out of line with the pay scales of comparable jobs in the same industry. Furthermore, the grading is completely subjective, as some team leaders will let the power get to their head and be draconian about grading, while others understand the futility of the system and massively inflate their grades to keep their writers happy/make sure they make rent. Therefore, an employee's pay is often times not based on the quality of their work product, but the degree to which their grader feels the need to follow the minutia of the grading criteria as closely as possible. This is my strongest plea: if you do not eliminate the grading system, you will never retain writers. They will get a better offer from a company that doesn't run itself like the worst college class you've ever taken, they will leave, and they will advise people against taking these jobs. Please, have some respect for the employees. They're adults. Don't treat them like children. Give them performance reviews, pay them a fair, even rate for their work, and frame problems with their writing in the context of potential issues with the USCIS, not in the void of the writing position and the grading system. It's a lot easier to care about improving your writing, and the entirety your work more generally, when you understand the extent to which these details can affect the livelihood of others.
Another idea: Lead more meetings within the office; happy hours or trips out are fine, but if you want people to actually enjoy coming to work and being around their coworkers, a large part of that comes by removing the weird expectation of total silence that's always present in the office. This will also help people not to be afraid to ask questions directly rather than waiting for days for an email response. Perhaps even have office (or department/team)-wide meetings with a manager physically present where people can report progress, share ideas, and express concerns. There is an understanding in the office that the digital quarterly reports workers fill out will be used against them; eliminate this fear by flying to an office that you own and manage and spend 8 hours there actually seeing face-to-face the people you work with.
Miscellaneous cons: drab office environment, very few perks (there is no 401k match and insurance is all bare bones with high deductibles), clients communicate on forums where they learn that berating the employees = big discounts, so clients are frequently pretty abusive towards employees when they receive standard products to try to save a few hundred bucks.
