Pros
When I joined, Savvas was still a division of Pearson Education and I came here for the chance to work remotely, but the CEO’s push for in-office working is disappointing. She believes that in-office working promotes collaboration, but if this year proved anything, it was that we can still be successful remotely. In fact, I find I’m more productive remotely without the distractions of loud conversations or being “caught” in a water cooler discussion. Bethlam genuinely cares about her people. COVID brought about hard times, but rather than straight reductions in force that I’ve seen elsewhere, we all went on reduced hours. “We all suffered a little, so no one would suffer a lot”. And what good news it was to learn that our lost wages during that time would be recovered because we still exceeded our goals. My previous two employers would have just kept those funds on the books and we would have been none the wiser. I’m so glad we have a workflow team. This is CRITICAL in the work we do. I just wish teams wouldn’t “pick and choose” what tasks to do and actually follow one through and through. Savvas has recently rolled out the “framework” which seems to provide room to grow in certain tracks, so I look forward to that. Even though the old way of moving up would mean a Director > VP, etc. this helps provide something to work forward to.
Cons
Communication is a huge issue, but this isn’t a Savvas issue, per se, it’s more of a “pre-existing condition” from Pearson. We don’t know when key people move to new teams. We don’t know when new programs are coming down the line. Some teams are so big, no one knows who should [do this task]. We have Savvy, Salesforce, Dayforce, and Google Sites which provide *several* sources of truth for company information as opposed to just one. Case in point, Dayforce has all of our HR policies and holiday schedules, etc., but we received no email that this was the case. Savvy is hardly updated yet it’s supposed to be our “company hub for information”. Lastly, the cross-functional headbutting is terrible. Let’s just say, in the course of performing my duties, I’m constantly met with resistance citing schedule or cost constraints. While these are understandable constraints, the fact is, the markets require [my job be done] and by not doing so, we pose risk to opportunities to be in that and other markets. Moreover, we potentially lose the ability to be differentiated from our competitors. More often than not, rework is required because when they’re forced to [do it], they’ve lost time.
