Pros
Every company has its unique culture and idiosyncrasies. On the whole, Zayo is a great place to work for a certain kind of person; namely one who is very committed to their work life, extremely detailed oriented, willing to work hard and get their hands dirty, wants to be thoroughly challenged and isn’t afraid to fail. For that type of person, Zayo has been, and continues to be, a great experience with an abundance of opportunities. It is a great place for new professionals to develop rapidly as well as a great place for seasoned professionals to be challenged and make a difference. If you aren’t that type of person, Zayo may not be the right place for you. I would suspect some of the negative reviews posted come from people from acquired companies who just simply don’t share these goals, which is fine. Zayo is extremely good at acquisition and integration – people, assets and processes. This at times may come off as harsh or insensitive, and it can be uncomfortable if you are part of an acquired company, but it is far better than the alternative which is stringing out integrations over a long period of time to a much higher cost in morale and dollars. Zayo is remarkably stable for all the change it has undergone. Zayo has been very consistent in its business plan and has delivered strong results which further leads to stability. There are great folks at Zayo who are extremely dedicated, hardworking and share a common goal. The biggest derailer is priority – priorities for different people in many cases aren’t in alignment and if you don’t share the same priorities, then it is far more challenging to keep a process or project performing as desired. This is most pronounced when working outside your direct product group since that is how the company is organized. This is a natural tension to this organizational structure and per comments below, the operational maturity at Zayo does not always do well at overcoming this. This is being partially addressed by adding resources to key groups, but operational maturity is an underlying issue.
Cons
HR is underdeveloped – Zayo still feels like a “small company” relative to HR which is in many ways a positive. Recruiting and hiring is a real challenge where support is thin and numerous hiring rules make a challenging process much more difficult. Administration of HR activities is not highly developed. As mentioned above, there is still a remarkable amount of opportunity within Zayo to develop more systematic and methodical processes and to work smarter rather than harder. Zayo’s roots are brute force and feats of strength, and there will always situations where that is appropriate, but it is still far too common in the culture. There are still situations where prioritization occurs via escalation rather than proactive and careful planning. In cases, this reinforced by senior management who ask for unreasonable deliverables in unrealistic timeframes and (intentionally or not) don’t accept or encourage calibration of expectations. Related to the above, I see a gap in metrics and measures between the top levels of the organization and the working level. At the top, there is an abundance of metrics and measures and I expect the perception is controls are in place because data is available in Salesforce. At the working levels of the organization, there is still too much brute force and in cases, the data in Salesforce is just not reliable because systems are not being leveraged. I consider the above indirect positives as developing operational excellence is rewarding and makes a good thing better.
