I worked in the Communications department, so some of my review will be rather limited to what I saw and experienced in the Comms/Sales/Admin area of the office. From what I’ve heard from others, though, a lot of these problems persist across departments. The long and short of it is this: you do not want to work here. If you are very desperate like I was (I took an unconventional education path and had little industry-relevant experience) chances are they will hire you, but do not stop applying to other jobs and have an exit plan in mind. This is not somewhere you want to work long-term, unless you enjoy being demeaned and underpaid. Management is terrible. HR is useless and impossible to contact 90% of the time. I’ve worked several horrible food service jobs over the years, and somehow this managed to be the worst place I’ve ever worked and also the place with the highest turnover rate. Special mention to the execs Mary and Yvonne, who are guaranteed to make your work-life miserable if you have to report to them.
First: If you are looking for an LGBTQ and/or disability friendly workplace, this is not it. HR offers little to no flexibility in your schedule (pretty strictly 8-5 with a mandatory 1 hour lunch, save for a few people who get approval to work 7-4). So if you, say, want to adjust your schedule so you can leave at 3:30 for an appointment, they instead make you use a half day of PTO.
The benefits are limited and not all that great, and a lot of them only kick in after X months of full-time work. Sounds normal, except you are considered part-time for the first 60 days, and when it comes to sign a full-time contract, HR becomes impossible to contact. When I asked what the process for moving from part-time to full-time was, I was told that they were working on developing one, despite the company operating under contract-to-hire for years. Some people I worked with went MONTHS beyond their 60-day probationary period without a full-time offer because HR would just not respond to them. When you got to your manager about it, they shrug their shoulders and say that it’s all up to HR and you should just try contacting them again. When you finally do get an offer, it will not be backdated to the date you were supposed to start full-time. Also, the bit about being able to negotiate your pay again upon being hired full-time is a straight-up lie. Everyone gets a $1/hr raise, and if you try to get more or even schedule a conversation to talk about compensation, you’ll be shot down. Additionally, all the campus perks advertised in the job description are for the old campus, where you will not be working. The only perk at the new campus is an on-site gym, but only the execs are allowed to use it. They say it's because of COVID, but 6 months after dropping the mask requirements, the gym is still closed to regular employees.
Another note about HR and management in general: I’ve had my share of terrible managers, but this company takes it to another level. The company does not care about you at all, which again is nothing I haven’t experienced before, but the execs and HR don’t even bother to pretend that respect their employees.
I was hired as a writer for the Communications team, or so I thought. OATI outsources the majority of their writing to the team in India, so writers in the US are given a bunch of miscellaneous work and mostly regulated to event planning. The Comms team had horrible turnover partly because of this. It’s not a matter of them hiring bad writers either; I had many talented coworkers and was told that my work was excellent, but they just didn’t have enough writing and editing work to go around. I understand that all jobs include “other duties as assigned” for a reason, buy I was probably doing about 80% miscellaneous event and administration stuff (because the administration department has even WORSE turnover somehow) and only 20% writing. The company is completely misrepresenting its communications jobs (in job postings, interviews, and even in your first few weeks), and then management acts super surprised when people are unhappy. When I did have writing work, I got little to no useful feedback on it, so don’t expect to learn anything while you’re here either. There is no training that’s relevant for Communications people, so if you want to write accurately about the company’s products or the energy industry overall, you’re going to have to do you own research.
When it comes to getting any projects completed, you’re going to get kneecapped by the company’s insane processes—which no one is going to explain to you and you’re somehow expected to just know. Everything has to be approved by the CEO and his wife, the executive VP and the company’s second-in-command. This means that when you’re told a project is a priority and needs to be done ASAP, it will often sit in her approval queue for weeks or sometimes months because the exec VP doesn’t delegate and has to control everything in the company. If you don’t follow the approval process exactly as the exec VP wants (document formatting, who you need to talk to, who needs to be on the approval list, etc) you will get reprimanded, although no one teaches you these processes when you’re hired and there’s no company resources for learning this either. I can’t count the number of times that I was told “you were supposed to be doing X thing this way” like I was the stupid one, except no one had ever bothered telling that to me when I was given the task. The exec VP also loves to change her mind about projects after you’ve completed them. It was also very common for work to go this: I would be told to complete X task, and after doing so, I was told that was incorrect, and actually I should do Y and Z. You are going to waste so much of your time reworking projects because you aren’t given clear instructions from the get-go and/or the exec is going to decide that they want to project to encompass something completely different than what was originally assigned.
I truly cannot recommend this company to anyone. Do not even waste your time applying here.
