Pros
I have met so many amazing people working here. (Unfortunately, the very best are almost always overworked and burnt out.) Full-time employees do have access to a 401k program and health insurance (only partially paid for by the company for hourly workers, fully paid for salaried management). The sky is the limit if you have the right connections.
Cons
There is a complete lack of HR structure and training. Despite the fact that the company prides itself on excellent customer service and many of the hourly workers interact with the public, there is absolutely no diversity or sensitivity training. This should be a concern as the workforce and workplace culture is very homogeneous. You were often expected to report any issues to your manager, but there were few alternatives if the issues were coming from your manager. There is a complete lack of boundaries at work. Management will text hourly employees on their off time. The former CEO would bring his children in and have the kids run the games. There is a lot of talk about “being a family,” but this is usually brought up when expecting employees to go above and beyond their actual job description. Job duties constantly expand, but you’ll still be paid exactly the same. (There are opportunities for pay raises, but wages are capped at an unreasonably low level.) The company is rife with favoritism. Excellent employees are passed over for promotions they are overqualified for while unprepared employees with personal connections to HQ are promoted beyond the level of their incompetence. If you attend church with the owners, you’ll be fast-tracked. If you’re of a different religion, skintone, sexual orientation, or the wrong gender, you’ll have to work much harder to advance. There are very clear double-standards in how rules are (arbitrarily) enforced. Punishment for mistakes is entirely dependent of the person making the mistake. Infractions that should be grounds for demotion or firing are instead given a slap on the wrist if the employee is a favorite. If the employee is not in the good graces of corporate, small infractions will result in abrupt firings despite excellent past performance. This creates unclear expectations for employees despite regular reviews with management, and is hugely damaging to morale in the long-term. Corporate likes to pay lip service to the idea of not wanting “yes men.” This is untrue based on their actions. Any criticism is taken as having a negative attitude, even when feedback is specifically asked for. Employees who want to make an earnest effort to improve operations can quickly gain a reputation for not being “all in”. One member of corporate has repeatedly joked about getting employees to “drink the kool-aid” in regards to The Escape Game brand. The level of dedication that the company expects from employees is massively out of step with the (lack of) loyalty they show to their employees. They expect hourly workers to be on-call, but will cut hours drastically at the drop of a hat. Corporate expects employees to eat, sleep, and breathe The Escape Game, but they won’t pay you enough to eat, sleep, or breathe. New rules and policies are rolled out with very little warning or explanation. Often policies are changed or reversed without clear announcements. The company likes to roll out changes all at once, so expect completely new procedures whenever a new manager is brought in. (Generally this will breed resentment with the hourly employees towards the new manager because they will perceive that person as the source of these changes.) Questioning new procedures is also seen as having a negative attitude (even when just asking for clarification on actual implementation). Corporate is always looking for the chance to squish the schedule down even more while running even lighter shifts. The trend is to cut time between games for set-up and cleaning while cutting the number of people on shift. Management and corporate watch and listen to every moment of employees at the local stores on cameras placed in both the public and employee spaces. The cameras are constantly monitored, because corporate does not trust the people they have hired. Turnover is high so perhaps that is of some concern to corporate. Based on their inaction, it seems that they believe installing more and more cameras to watch people is a better use of their money and resources than cutting down on turnover or paying their employees enough to support themselves. Be aware that multiple people have been fired over things said on camera. When corporate starts to feel that employee morale is low, they’ll generally send someone to the local store to give a speech about “getting in on the ground level” and emphasizing the growth of the company. The problem is that the growth is not sustainable or well-planned. Proposed store openings are announced, pushed back, and canceled in seemingly equal measure. (This is another source of confusion for employees as the locations that can be disclosed to customers changes radically.) These group pep talks are usually enough to raise employee morale for a few months and are accompanied by an earnest effort from corporate to support the local store. After those few months, corporate will revert to their usual behavior and morale will start to fall again. All in all, the favoritism and hypocrisy make the workplace culture incredibly toxic. For people who are on the good side of corporate, it’s a great gig. For people who are not, it’s an incredibly draining experience. People who work at corporate generally look down on the local store workers despite not having a clear understanding of the stresses of their job. (The solution to this is not to have random employees from corporate spend a day at the local store when it’s incredibly slow; it’s to actually listen to the feedback that the local store employees give.)