Manhattan Strategy Group reviews

Generally a terrible experience and I couldn't wait to get out. During my time, staff morale was dismal, and for good reason. Salaries were just okay. Telework was too severely restricted for the DC Metro area - you had to prove you lived more than 30 miles from the office to qualify for a one-day-per-week WFH privilege (unless you were a manager, of course, then you could work from home pretty often), Org suffered from too many high-level managers and not enough lower level staff doing the actual work. Most higher-ups lacked good people-management skills AND basic technical skills in Microsoft Office, pushing too many tasks to underlings and generally making work harder on everyone else. Focus seemed to be more on winning new contracts than executing them properly, so staff were usually spread too thin. And sometimes staff were reassigned to totally different positions with no warning. Some attempts were made at employee morale-building and PD, but many were somewhat misguided and generally insulting to staff intelligence. No 401K match, and health care benefits weren’t great either. Basically, an environment that did manage to hire a lot of smart and competent people but couldn’t retain them for long, because they didn’t feel appreciated.

While it's mostly a good place to work, but there are some red flags. There is no system in place for performances, which leads to firings out of the blue. In March, four people were fired in one month. Those who were not fired received a vague email from a director saying that we are moving “in an exciting direction” before the fourth person was fired. No one addressed the issue head on. Previously, others who were completely fine at their job, but had annoying (yet harmless) personalities were fired out of the blue. It’s hard to believe that management is on our side when anyone who is good at their job could still be fired for being unlikeable. The pay and benefits are very low for the industry. We have non-profit level salaries yet are expected to work in a consulting environment, including on weekends, especially on proposals, throughout the year, and without non-profit benefits (more vacation days, cheap insurance). If a client asks for something last minute, we are expected to do it, but again, on a non-profit salary. Lastly, this is a technical assistance company, which means that it’s hard to become an expert in your field. You will be responsible for connecting tasks to an expert, so you won’t get experience in education, workforce programs, or international development. You will learn who is important in these industries, how to plan conferences in these industries, or how to create webinars in these industries. But you will not become an education, workforce or development expert.