So much money is spent on those events that we've openly talked about why it's so hard to get competitive pay when our job descriptions started evolving and duties double or triple when the company experienced explosive growth over the past few years. HR wants to hire the top people, but the wages are horrible in some departments. This may have been an OK practice during the recession when people were desperate for work, but nowadays this is just insulting. Not sure how executive assistants straight out of college are making more than experienced people, but whatevs.
HR and management would rather have a person anchored to a position until they quit just because that person is good at their job and filling that gap would take time. This happens a lot, just look at the turnover that has happened over the past 10 years! People who actively try to move into another title and have the experience the job positing requires are shrugged off. Then management is surprised when people put in notices.
A review from a couple weeks ago pointed out how employees are made to entertain the executives with skits and other distractions that are labelled as team-building exercises or WIG presentations. PDI is growing rapidly and deadlines are omnipresent, but stop everything you are doing to dress up and be Mitch's jester. Then have management come down on you for not getting an urgent project out fast enough. Fair enough.
PDI still feels like a high school, something a lot of us were hoping would change as the company grew. There are cliques and bullies and outsiders. The Bro culture has been amplified since the gym was finished. Some of the employees have an enlarged sense of entitlement that they are completely incapable of common courtesy.
The work hard, play hard mantra has to stop. PDI isn't a big name corporate entity with stock holders and a board of directors. PDI a private family run company and suffers from many of the negative qualities of being just that. Some people with zero work experience hold VP positions or become project managers. Some of it is nepotism, some of it is part of maintaining a youthful appearance to impress clients who tour the office. Is PDI afraid to hire older or unattractive people who don't fit a certain beauty profile? Raises some concerns about potential discrimination.
Every time a negative review pops up, it is followed by one or two cheer leader ones that fail to point out any of the common problems that employees, current and former, have been speaking out about since the pay-cut days. That doesn't make PDI look good, it gives off the appearance that the staffing and HR departments are trying to do damage control without ever addressing the real issues.
