During the interview and job offer process, the company was consistently portrayed as a quickly growing company with a lot of room for growth and upward movement. In my interview my hiring manager said he planned on promoting from within as the company grew and positions opened up, because he knew how bad for morale it would be to fill the new roles with outside hires. When I was called with the job offer, I was given 3 or 4 examples of people who hired on, worked hard, and were promoted and moved into new roles within their first 6-12 months at the company. The person offering me the job compared Keplr to State Farm and told me it would be better because I would be always learning new things and able to grow, that no one sat stagnant for long. I accepted the job, and for the first 5 months I was regularly working 10-20 hours a week of unpaid OT to help the company meet their goals. Around that time there were new roles being created in my department. I watched as all but one of those roles were filled with an outside hire. I asked several times for different people to show me new tasks so I could learn or grow as I was promised, and no one ever did. I left Keplr with the same technical knowledge I went in with.
Communication during the first part of the Covid Pandemic was barely existent. Certain members of the HR staff were rude and dismissive of concerns. Office employees were brought back in stages starting in Mid-May, but Covid protocols, like wearing masks, were not put into place until August. The bathrooms consistently did not have soap, unless it was brought in by an employee. Management did not give any consideration to parents whose kids were doing distance learning for the 2020-2021 school year, and would not allow them to work from home some days to be with their kids. One of the nights I stayed late I overheard two members of the executive management team discussing how they felt Covid was fake, but they were "fake complying" so they didn't get in trouble.
The first few months I worked at Keplr, even though I was putting in large amounts of OT, due to our department being understaffed, I felt valued. Management seemed to care about the employees and appreciated the extra hours we were putting in. Around May/June of 2020 that all changed. It no longer felt like management valued their employees. I was talked down to by members of upper management. My manager no longer seemed willing to hear my departments concerns or offer any help to us. Morale is down among most non-manager employees.
