Good work/life balance, but no security - Anonymous employee HRchitect Employee Review

Thanks for taking the time to review your experience! I’m glad you found good work/life balance, and thanks for your kind words about Brian – we think he’s great, too. I’m glad you found your time at HRchitect to allow you to maintain a healthy work/life balance, and that you found value in the unlimited PTO. With a smaller organization, it can be tricky if multiple people working on the same project want to take PTO at the same time, since we don’t want to compromise the quality of our client’s projects. We’re working on this by cross-training more of our consultants so someone else can assist on a project in the future if we have many overlapping vacation requests. I’m sorry you were bored at times. We try very hard not to overwhelm our consultants with too heavy a workload, but it sounds like you were up for more of a challenge and we didn’t provide you with enough of that. We’ll do better in the future by making sure to check in with consultants to make sure they aren’t feeling bored. All consulting companies go through ups and downs in work demand, and typically, other consulting companies will let someone go as soon as a project ends and there isn’t another to fill that gap. This is not how HRchitect operates. We hold on to our consultants as long as we can and put a strong focus on cross training and other initiatives to help avoid that situation. If we do have to make that drastic decision, we always pay out bonuses owed and severance pay based on how long somebody has been with the company. The only reasons someone would not be offered severance pay would be termination due to cause (i.e. performance) or if they quit and chose to leave HRchitect voluntarily. We do have a non-compete agreement, which is the standard in consulting, because consulting organizations spend a great deal of time and money training and cultivating their consultants (at least we do). Unfortunately, some people will take advantage of that if a company doesn’t have a non-compete agreement. However, our non-compete is fair, in comparison to what we’ve seen from other consulting organizations. There’s a short time limit on it, and as long as someone leaves and doesn’t go immediately to a direct competitor (of which there are few), there’s never an issue. We live in a nation of laws, and just like anybody else would, we do ask that employees respect that legally binding document that they signed when they accepted employment. Our leadership is really proud of the HRchitect team. We hire great people and they do amazing work for our clients. For example, Matt recently said in a weekend update (our internal newsletter), “Thank you for being part of the greatest consulting team in the world!”. I see this as leadership having the utmost confidence in the employees at HRchitect, but I see how this may be perceived as overconfident. We’re always trying to improve communication, especially as a remote company, and although we have weekly internal newsletters, quarterly company-wide calls, and annual face to face team meetings, there’s always room for improvement here. We continue to work on that. If you have suggestions to improve communications that you’d be willing to share, we’d love to hear from you.