Pros
The owner is passionate about the company and its people. That passion trickles down to upper management and can make the place feel lighthearted and fun. The owner is very transparent about his actions and intentions. They hire very talented people and pay a great deal of attention to how those people with work with the present culture of the company. Culture is thrown around a lot in companies but they really did try to create their own version of it. Benefits and pay were pretty standard and felt comparable to others in the area. Whenever faced with difficult decisions about the business, management seemed to put a lot of thought into the impact it would have on the people. Company events were cool before COVID.
Cons
Although it’s close, UNION hasn’t found that sweet spot on culture yet. A great example is, although they have a Ping-pong table, foosball table, pinball machines and more, they were never used because employees were too worried about taking a break from their work. The reason for this is most likely because UNION is so driven by data and analytics that employees have to track their time for the week and will receive an email every Monday with names of those who missed clocking their 40 hours. They even have percentages of how much of your time should be billable vs. non-billable based on your position. This is their way of monitoring overhead which does help with giving profit shares back to employees but takes away from the culture that they’ve tried to build. There was a pattern I witnessed of having experienced people in certain roles but not trusting their decisions and previous experiences. This doesn’t instill trust or confidence in employees at all. Management seemed to constantly be changing company processes and employee roles. This made it difficult to find a rhythm and caused confusion on who reported to who and where you needed to go to get something complete. My direct manager would sometimes struggled with giving clear directions and setting expectations which caused riffs between us several times. A few times I was met with hostility for a miscommunicated goal. Even after having conversations with my manager and HR it didn’t seem to improve.