Pros
The Employees: The majority of the people who work here are creative, hard working, overqualified, and generally awesome. The Clients: Working at mindWireless provided the opportunity for an inside look at the corporate culture of Fortune 500 companies and other large enterprises. Working with some of these well-known names does look great on a resume.
Cons
Misrepresentation to potential employees: This is by far my biggest complaint about mindWireless. Management does not accurately describe the job to potential new hires. mW targets recent college graduates with some work experience on their resumes, people who are ready to really lay some foundation to build a career. mindWireless tells them that there is room to grow and advance when in fact there is not. The turnover rate is extremely high because the company does not value its employees. mW is fine with hiring and firing rather than raising salaries and promoting from within. There are plenty of qualified people in Austin, TX who are willing to work a low paying job like this for 6 months to 1 year, and I feel that they should be marketing this job to those people (or at the very least be honest to their target employee market). The management team also tells new employees that mW offers "competitive salaries" for the position, but a little research proves that mW salaries are considerably lower than the industry average in Austin, TX. Had my expectations been set accordingly when I started working at this company, my "Cons" list in this review would be much shorter. Misrepresentation to clients: This company is barely able to keep its head above water and provide contractually obligated services. Each current client is so essential to keeping the company afloat that the management team is consistently breaking their own rules and creating new ones to put a temporary bandage on an issue, rather than addressing the root of a problem. Employees are taken advantage of: While employees at small organizations are expected to wear many hats, mW takes it too far. Several Mobility Care Associates (including myself) have had the opportunity to step up and take leadership roles within the help desk team by taking on the role of a Mobility Care Manager after one of the said managers leaves the company (which happens often with the high turnover rate). So these lucky hybrid employees do the work of an Associate as well as the work of a Manager for specific clients, however are not compensated in any way. If mW has no intention of promoting these employees, they should thank them for the work they have done in the interim and hire someone to whom they are willing to award the "Manager" title. I spent nearly 8 months in this hybrid position (with no raise or promotion), and others have spent longer. Poor working environment: mW takes micromanagement to the extreme. We are logged into live queues taking calls, so it is understandable that some system should be in place to ensure that we are meeting service license agreements. The company chooses to do this by having someone monitor help desk employees all day, and send messages to the employee if they are out of the queue for more than a minute or two. Management does not take the hybrid employees' (mentioned in the previous paragraph) job duties into consideration, so the hybrids are harassed regularly despite the fact that they must log out of the live queues to address help desk account management related duties. All employees must clock in and out upon arrival, lunch and departure. There is no grace period with the time punches, so if an employee is just a few seconds late it is counted as an "occurrence" on his or her record. The working environment is very much like that of a call center, although the management team refuses to admit this (and insists that it is not). The overall direction and goal of the company are a mystery: The company does not communicate any of this to its employees. Employees have no idea where the company stands in the marketplace nor any idea of what quarterly and yearly revenues look like. Even the structure of the help desk is changing, but the company has done nothing to communicate (or even acknowledge) the changing environment that directly effects our day to day duties. Office politics: I understand that office politics are inevitable, therefore this is not as high on my "Cons" list. This is a major complaint for many employees so I do feel that it is worth mentioning. The CEOs are very active in their church, so they do a lot of recruiting for open positions through the church. The church recruits who are hired are definitely favored and promoted over other employees that are equally (and in some cases more) qualified. How the CEOs chooses to hire and promote is certainly their business, but many employees feel that the church recruiting/promoting is unfair and frustrating.
