IEDC Reviews

HOW WOULD YOU FEEL IF YOU RECEIVED AN EMAIL IN ALL CAPS. ALL IN THE SUBJECT LINE. FOLLOWED BY QUESTION MARKS AND EXCLAMATION MARKS??????????!!!!!!!!! Well, that does not feel good, now does it? Welcome to IEDC and the barking communication style of the President and CEO. Work Environment. The building is old and probably not up to code. Majority of the space is a cube farm with loose walls that have become unhinged are ready to fall over. The ceiling is drop ceiling tile and it is living up to its “drop” as tiles are loose and hang haphazardly. The air quality and temperature is not regulated or healthy. In the Winter, if the heat is not working, staff is forced to work in their coats and share space heaters that are spread throughout the office. In the Summer, it can get to a sweltering 82 degrees with no air circulation. There have been cases of staff leaving due to dizziness and nausea. The furniture and equipment is old and recycled from the 30 year tenure of the President. The safety and comfort is not a priority for staff. There is a reoccurring rodent issue. Recommendation: Notify OSHA. Staff. A staff of 30 that is probably now hovering around 20 or less, not including contractors. About 10+ staff have left this year with more anticipated to exit as soon as the opportunity arises. There is a good group of staff that are knowledgeable and accountable. Then there are the bullies and this term is not being used loosely. They think they are immune to accountability and they rule the office. The President allows them to do so, little does he realize that this handful of staff have a distaste for him. CAO is/was Human Resources. This position was not able to provide the safe harbor, confidentiality, ethical and lawful processes to any staff because he was not given the support or tools needed to act on staff grievances. Recommendation: Outsource a Human Resource group, a lawful HR group with no biases. The staff has the right to have a voice and the option to confidentially and legally document complaints and concerns without fear of retribution. President. He operates in grey, nothing is ever black and white. This is a control tactic and allows him to change what he wants, when he wants, allowing him to blame who he wants. This leaves staff pining for his feedback, strokes his ego, and empowers his bullying ways. He is a likeable man until you work for him. He prides himself on his LinkedIn 4.76 billion connections. To the Board of Directors and the members he portrays himself as a kind upstanding man. To the staff he is belligerent, accusatory, racist and sexist. Sadly, those on the outside don't see the inner workings of this man and how he treats those who work so diligently to provide members and the Board quality projects and events. Why won’t staff speak up you may ask? When you are in this situation on a daily basis, you first try to become numb to it, second there is a true underlying fear. This man holds your livelihood in his hands whether you are a dual income household providing for your family, a single parent trying your best to raise a child or a single person trying to make a living in this area. You too, would have reservations to speak up. When you see a man like this strong arm various people and companies, it is frightful knowing that you could be on the same receiving end. Recommendation: Board of Directors needs to get involved and realize how things are truly run behind the scenes. Unbiased outsourced Human Resource group needs to get involved and protect the rights of all employees, unfortunately from a man who is supposed to be their leader, mentor, President.

The place is super-disorganized, with changing strategies, goals, projects. Mostly driven by the whims of the CEO, but all efforts to standardize/innovate/plan-by-anything more than the seat of the pants gets slapped down. project schedules? Don't even try. Budgets? Good luck seeing that. Information is handed out on a-need-to-know basis, and there's a 50% chance that the person who is telling you that doesn't know because the goals and objectives have already been changed. Half the time you hear about something going on you are like "WTF!" because it either goes directly against everything you have already heard, or just doesn't make any sense, and you never hear why that got changed. There is absolutely no commitment to training employees or giving them opportunities (travel, education, certifications, networking), even though those shouldn't be hard to come by what with all the members and being in DC and all. Management is whimsical to be generous. Senior managers are generally incompetent. It's not clear what their purpose or value-add is. The CEO is rarely around because he is mainly just enjoying free glad-handing and back-slapping around the country (the Board loves him and seems pretty oblivious to the disastrous conditions in the office), and doesn't participate in any decisionmaking (or even delegating sometimes) but then will swoop in at the last second to utterly micromanage things, usually in a really rude and unpredictable way. Good luck trying to explain why months of planning and deliberation had gotten you to where you are. This maybe explains why new employees often come in with cool ideas that get slapped down and they end up disheartened and not caring. Why care when there seems to be no effort, no culture, no reward or punishment whether work gets done well or poorly, if at all?! Eventually a lot of these usually leave. Super high turnover. For maybe 30 people who work there, expect as many as 10 to leave in a given year! Plus you have the bullies. There is a group of employees who are just mean, secretive, judgmental, unsupportive. They have each other's backs but nobody else's. In fact, they generally try to undermine both management and the junior staff. Longer-term employees tend to be rewarded because of their loyalty, not because of their competence. They either get some sweetheart deal of working from elsewhere, or they bitterly prowl the office, looking for ways to make themselves better by undercutting everyone else (sometimes even their 'friends' the other bullies). A lot of your time will be spent avoiding these people, until you face head-on conflict with them. Then the gloves come off, and you are sure to lose, since even though the bullies hate the CEO, he eggs them on and doles out special favors to his enforcers. I really wanted to like this job but the horrible culture, the disorganization, the mismanagement really killed it for me.