This company was sold to me as a “young professional, work hard/play hard, Google-type” environment. So, perhaps naively, I assumed the company would actually live up to the expectations it set during the interviews. I came in expecting to work my butt off yet be rewarded or at least mildly appreciated for it. This assumption was so far from the truth I’m surprised the interviewers weren’t snickering as they lied straight to my face.
I thought I had seen everything that could be wrong about a workplace prior to taking this job. From the illegal billing practices to next-level insane micromanagement, my experience at Alliantgroup taught me new and improved ways to foster an abusive environment and run a company completely into the ground.
For those considering taking at job at Alliantgroup, allow me to educate you:
1. How to succeed at Alliantgroup.
This company consistently pushes away its top performers in favor of employees who will put more effort into cheerleading than doing their jobs. I have certainly worked at companies where the employees who drank the kool-aid also consistently worked the hardest out of anybody. There’s nothing wrong with towing the party line because you want to do a great job. The problem is when the company does not care about the “great job” and rewards only those blindly touting its supposed merits.
The focus at Alliantgroup is not doing good work. Nor is it doing mediocre work, nor is it working at all. You will get in trouble for leaving on time, even if your work is done. Prepare to be interrogated about every single detail of your day--by more than one person. Please note that nobody cares if you are actually working, the higher ups are only concerned with the amount of (billable) hours you take while maintaining the illusion of working. Even if you’re looking at Pinterest until 10pm, wasting the company’s time and the client’s money is a job well done at Alliantgroup.
Which brings us to…
2. Meetings.
You will have one nearly every day, and the topics on the agenda will never get covered. Rather, your department will be expected to trap itself in a conference room for 3 hours in order for the managing director to get his kicks by publicly calling out specific people for imagined lack of performance. When an executive has no concrete issue for which to bully you, he or she will either take a personal jab or manufacture a situation in which you are pushed to react and then belittle you for taking things too seriously. God forbid if you have a legitimate question to ask, you will be called an idiot for not already knowing the answer. Shame on you for trying to learn.
This is textbook manipulation, by the way, and the amount of it across all levels and job titles is unbelievable. It is worse than a 5th grade playground. I witnessed on several occasions the head of our department outright lying to members of project teams in order to pit them against each other. To what end?? I have yet to figure out the purpose or usefulness of such tactics. It certainly did not serve to foster team building or even promote productivity. In fact, the sheer amount of time required to serve face was an active deterrent to efficiency as well as morale.
I should have run when, on my first day, we were stuck in one such meeting until 10:30pm and an executive took the entire evening to yell at one person and force her to defend herself. Even as a new employee, I couldn’t figure out what she had done wrong, just that she was in the hot seat for whatever reason the capricious executive had decided to pick that day.
3. Micromanagement.
You would assume that a company, upon hiring a person to do a job, would expect that person to do that job.
At Alliantgroup, you would be wrong.
If you choose to work there, you will be regularly interrogated about the basic tasks you accomplish throughout the day by multiple levels of management. Apparently it’s crucial to the inner workings of the entire company that these overseers know the detailed minutiae of even the most mundane to-do items. The management does not believe its employees to be “capable” (direct quote) of handling their work. Thus, the peons must be micromanaged.
Expect angry emails at 2am demanding to know the status of a project, no matter that it can be easily found on the company-wide server or even--crazy idea--dealt with during work hours. Expect to send a spreadsheet detailing every single thing you’ve accomplished for the day within an inch of how many bathroom breaks you’ve taken to an executive who receives over 200 such emails and has no intentions of ever reading it. This meaningless process will take you over an hour. Which, of course, also means extra time to bill to each of the applicable clients. Management has zero interest in maximizing the efficiency of this practice, by the way. Any attempt to streamline the process into even a weekly status report rather than daily is an undertaking rivaling that of Sisyphus.
Bonus Takeaways:
If you try to maximize the efficiency of anything at Alliantgroup, go ahead and pack up your desk because you will be let go.
If you try to request time off, pack up your desk because you will be let go.
If you spend more time working than trying to get an invite to paintball with your boss, you will be accused of “not trying hard enough to build a relationship” with him regardless of your attempts to get on his calendar in order to touch base, so you better pack up your desk because you will be let go.
If you play the game well, do your job, and tow the party line, the company will still be losing money to its ill-advised investment into the new building and multiple major lawsuits, so pack up your desk because you will be let go.
Alliantgroup is and always will be a lose-lose situation.
My only regret is not eating more of the mediocre free food (Café Express!) while I had the chance.
