Pros
I love working with many of my colleagues. A lot of really smart hardworking people work at TNTP. I feel truly blessed to have worked with some of the people I have worked with.
Cons
A lot of those smart hardworking people are being taken advantage of. Face it, TNTP does not practice what it preaches. We know about how to run organizations well and how you should treat staff, we tell clients about it all the time, but our own practices are so bad and leadership keep making the same mistakes over and over again. Salaries and benefits are mediocre and it still seems like we always need to tighten the belt more. The executive team constantly pretends to staff that things are more OK than they are and comes up with all kinds of doublespeak to justify all the decisions they make behind closed doors. Because we were 100 per cent remote even before COVID you don’t know if what you are hearing from your supervisors is what other people are hearing. Even after changing to how management works, managers have too much power over the career pathways of their direct reports. The goals process is such a waste of time because your evaluation is still going to come down to your relationship with your manager. Communication is very inconsistent and at times dishonest. Just say you need to lay people off for financial reasons instead of isolating individual staff members and making their lives so miserable that they quit, and then filling the roles with temps or not at all. Leaders are also awful at responding to criticism and go on about how employees need to demonstrate “TNTP core values” by being good sports and putting up with bad policies or mistakes. “Extending grace” gets mentioned a lot but mostly when leadership wants the rank and file to forgive them for a mistake, while expectations placed on staff in return are unreasonable. Flexibility of working from home is meaningless if you are just working all the time. I would understand if it were an accepted part of the culture, but don’t pretend like you care about not burning out your staff and then burn them out anyway. Just be honest.