Promotions: these are popularity contests. If the management group that decides who to promote doesn’t like you, you will not get promoted. If your immediate team lead or manager is not well liked within that group, it will not matter if they advocate for you and show all manner of proof that you deserve promotion, even if you’ve met the ‘standards’ (if there even are any that are written down and disclosed). People who blatantly neglect their designated responsibilities, pawn off their work onto their peers, and claim credit for other people’s projects will be promoted if they are well liked by upper management. Most of the people who get promoted will be white males. Lack of communication: individual expectations were never clearly communicated. Documented goals were vague, and the specific applications of how to fulfil those goals was always ambiguous. Many people sacrifice work-life balance and work untold hours of unpaid overtime to hit these goals, only to be told they somehow missed the mark. It’s like trying to hit moving targets that you don’t even know are moving. Gaslighting: gaslighting was a foreign concept until BerkleyNet. Managers often listened to a lot of 3rd party speculation ABOUT someone, without ever speaking TO that person until they’d already made up their mind that that person was guilty of whatever someone said about them. You won’t be told who was complaining about you, and managers will likely refuse to ask the person talking about you to speak directly to you to address concerns and get clarification. “I’ve been hearing that you are/aren’t doing ” was how a lot of check-ins started. Offers of proof to the contrary were met with, “perception is reality” and warnings about not being negative and needing to accept responsibility, and even that it looked bad to question the character of a coworker — even though it was painfully obvious that was already happening. Continued expressions of concern about this were met with insistent replies of, “that’s not what happened.” Approaching higher levels of management only resulted in a standardised reply that, “all claims had been verified” and direction to focus on being a better employee by spending more time doing the job and less time being defensive. 18 months of feeling crazy, because despite keeping extensive records and notes, management continuously insisted that their “version” was the only possible right one. Systems: despite touting themselves as a tech company, none of the systems function reliably. Employees are told to put in tickets for fixes, but are then told to figure out workarounds, many of which end up being extremely manual and tedious and time consuming. Once a workaround is verified to be effective, the tickets are either closed or sit in limbo indefinitely. The workaround is considered to be the fix. They have been talking about a new policy system since the end of 2016 — almost seven years later, it’s still not fully implemented. Training: all trainings are designed and implemented in-house. This is true for every kind of training, from training contract workers to do menial tasks, to management courses on leadership and communication. There are no external leadership trainings. It is an echo chamber. They also do not bring in outside consultants to provide fresh ideas or perspectives or other ways of doing things. Those ideas are all expected to come from employees — by which I mean that employees are required to submit a certain number of “innovation ideas” each month. Metrics & Micromanagement: this company lives and dies by their metrics. Employees’ performance conversations are usually based around how many widgets they touched, calls they took, items they handled, etc. Never mind that this number can easily be artificially inflated without much in the way of actual productivity — higher numbers means higher praise. Any effort to introduce the human element is regarded as making excuses for why numbers aren’t high enough. Illnesses, family responsibilities, or even just the fact that humans aren’t machines who can function at critical max indefinitely did not matter. There was some leeway for a death in the family — they requested the name of the funeral home and decedent because they said they wanted to send flowers. What actually happened was that they called the funeral home and tried to verify that the decedent was actually family, and later questioned why there was no published obituary. And of course no flowers were ever sent. “Underwriting”: very few people in the underwriting department do any actual underwriting. Regardless of length of experience, education, licensure, etc., you come in as an entry level employee, required to push widgets and answer phones in a call center environment. Climate & Culture: with very few exceptions, it’s a boys’ club. The qualities and values that comprise “The BerkleyNet Way” are lip service, and buckets they can use to tangentially categorise the actions or behaviours of the people they want to promote. The environment is designed to feel like you’re still in college — video game rooms, shuffleboard, ping pong. And the planned, themed events do not feel suitable for professional working adults (one year, the annual meeting theme was “BerkleyNet High” and the culminating event was a prom. Employees were encouraged to pair off with each other as “prom dates” despite many employees being married or on committed relationships with people outside the organisation). Workload: it’s unreasonable. Full stop. At one point, when something like 40% of the department quit in a short time span, management held feedback meetings to try to determine what the problems were. Instead of implementing the suggestions they were given, they decided they’d just announce that the company was operating under a “lean staffing model”. Not only could they not hire new people fast enough to replace those leaving, now they weren’t even trying. The workload of any departing employee was just expected to be absorbed by the employees who remained. There are years’ worth of examples from many current and former employees as to the toxic nature of this company. It used to be a fun and professional place to work. But it gradually became a nightmare for any people that weren’t part of management’s favourite people to drink with. And while HR knew exactly how to operate within the law, they also knew exactly what they could get away with to force people to quit so they wouldn’t have to terminate them and be faced with lawsuits (which I heard said out loud).
