Playworks Employee Reviews about "playful"

Pros

•Positive, playful workplace culture. Occasional gatherings, trainings, games, and free food •Amazing, talented and mission driven colleagues •Equity team (black, brown and POC team members) provided free virtual consultation and training towards the end of my time at playworks, really bringing issues of racial equity and justice to the fore, and building people's knowledge and understanding across all regions and levels of the organization. It was fantastic, much needed, and made me proud to work there. • Some people have had amazing, long careers working there with seemingly endless advancement opportunity and internal hiring practices

Cons

•A long history of poor management and financial oversight. Running at a deficit for years, overly relying on school funding, which has recently resulted in laying off or furloughing 75% of staff across the country, but has also caused several rounds of layoffs even years before covid. •High turnover •Lack of staff and board diversity. Notably super white at the executive, director level and board levels. No meaningful steps or even conversations being had about diversity as an issue or a specific goal •HR clearly just supports and covers whatever leadership does...so I never felt comfortable talking to them about microaggressions or concerns I had about the organizational culture. With the hundreds of people furloughed and layed off, there was no exit interview, survey, or systematized effort to take people's feedback into account, which just goes to show you how undervalued staff are • Lack of transparency in decisionmaking, and a general practice of making decisions based on leadership's highly subjective, disorganized opinions, rather than a specific, consistent and communicated strategy • Runs like a family company, and cherry picks people to advance based on ability to tolerate chaos and other negative aspects of the culture, having a lack of work life balance, etc. Towards the end before layoffs it became subtly cutthroat. If you sucked up to key leadership and looked busy or important, you were liked/retained. • Not successful with fundraising, in terms of events or individual giving especially. We had to cancel lots of in person events, and had a poorly planned and rushed attempt to host a nationwide virtual event. We over promised and under delivered by ultimately postponing and hosting nothing...It also irritated me how committees were formed, then random groups would kick other people off of the committees, all basically operating again with a random, messy and cherry picking approach that was neither productive nor inclusive. • After the first furlough, hundreds of employees sat around being paid by PPP funding we got. Instead of meaningfully engaging everyone as much as possible, and focusing on providing people opportunities to contribute in different ways, those folks just sat around getting paid by the government but doing nothing, while a small group of staff were working virtually around the clock. No ability to delegate or manage people effectively.

Pros

Playful professionalism is genuinely valued. Continuous learning is valued organization-wide. There are opportunities to advancement.

Cons

Some of the opportunities for advancement come up only seasonally and/or require people to move to a new location - but these things aren't unique to Playworks.

Pros

Non-profit rooted in its mission; room to grow professionally (and quickly); fun, playful and positive work culture; myriad of networking opportunities; transparent organization; supportive team nationwide!

Cons

At a regional level: Offices tend to visit the same schools for professional play days, which can be interpreted as such.