Pros
+ The biggest advantage is that Hub has a largely unstructured career path that allows you to move around and explore different areas of the company/industry and with the amount of turnover, opportunities are typically coming available regularly. If you are at corporate and sharp you will look to see how your skills are transferable to other divisions and move around. Don’t pigeon hole yourself to thinking you have to move up in your current workstream, you’ll just become stagnant. + Over the past couple years bonus alignment between divisions (fewer conflicting goals) and a more dynamic approach has allowed disciplined people to achieve a great bonus payout. Those bonus payouts made my year quite a few times. It’s not easy, but achievable if you stay in front of the numbers and alter your approach when things aren't working. The curveball here, and it’s a fairly large negative, is that the COO, on a whim, made adjustments to payout levels and actual metric categories in the 12th month of the cycle last year and rolled back the effective date to Jan 1, negating the hard work and effectively cutting payouts. If this continues the talk about bonus potential as a compensation lever becomes laughable. + Fairly decent medical coverage. 401k match is nothing impressive - the plan is paid once a year to reduce costs for Hub, if you leave before eoy you forfeit that money, stepped on a five year vesting. Yearly merit increases are generally capped at 3% though they can range 0% - 5%. Don’t look for anything above that. To get more than 3% you’ll need money in the budget (which means someone needs to be getting less than 3%) and strong/convincing advocacy from your leadership, missing any of those and you are stuck. Of course worth noting that this past year some employees had negative increases for various reasons resulting in salary reductions. + Front line work-life balance is generally decent. Straight 40, extra pay for 6th day (uncommon for salaried exempt positions but here it exists), holiday pay is overly generous, and in general no after-hours worries. Outside of COVID, no telecommuting unless you have an emergency and a decent leader. I will say that the extra day and holiday pay are constantly being tweaked and often with haphazard rollout and poor communication causing frustrations. + Because Hub is pendulumlike in direction if you stay in your trench eventually you spot trends and fixes without really having to try if not really trying is your thing.
Cons
- Annual RIF's over the past five years are used to get rid of expensive, tenured, knowledgeable, and generally effective employees. These generally result in doing more with less so morale is fairly anemic. The frequency in RIF’s has only increased. - Work-life balance for leadership leads something to be desired. The company flirts with the idea of providing after-hours coverage but doesn’t staff it and there is little to no accountability with the after-hours team so a lot of those emergencies and workflows go to the day to day leadership roles. 50-60 hours a week average plus always scanning your phone is a normal commitment for a manager on up so factor that in with the increase proposed on a promotion. Again, not a whole lot of flexibility in telecommuting. - The company since the early 2000s has been focused on the centralization of its staff to corporate. Today a hand-full of the former regional network offices exist. With the second HQ building going up it will only be a matter of time before Dave becomes tired of paying for an empty building and more positions will be relocated to corporate. - Juniors presence (started as a Director of acquisitions, currently COO and eventually will be CEO) has made the office culture contentious at best and toxic at worst. His style of leading is divisive and is always based on positional power, his only way to motivate is through fear. He's a commercial guy, has zero experience on the front line, doesn’t get the operations side, and cares only about the customer experience. He knows everything, can never be wrong, is emotional, and surrounds himself with yes and axemen. His net sum of experience all stems from nepotism - both inside and outside the company, and his lack of ever having to work for something shows in his delivery and interactions. It’s not horribly reassuring when his people have to deliver messages that “he’s getting better” at leading as an encouragement to those downrank. Yes, the stories about violent and unprofessional reactions are true. - Hub still thinks and operates like a brokerage company despite owning assets. The mantra that it is all about the customer experience leaves you myopic and exposed when you have costs adding up from idle drivers/trucks/containers and you have no leverage with your accounts. It also helps worsen the feast/famine cycle which only increases overhead. - Honestly, issues sit on both sides and at the end of the day, and the only thing everyone is “All In” on is pointing the finger at each other. Account Management is ill-equipped and ineffective with their accounts and feels Operations doesn’t get what they go through, and likewise, Operations is ill-equipped and ineffective in managing capacity/fleet and feels Account Management doesn’t get what they go through. The convergence of those two dynamics creates a lot of underlying tension and missed opportunities. - You, as a business leader, are told you own your business and are accountable for the results however what’s really expected is for you to just execute what comes downstream. You can't even staff effectively without first getting the CEO to sign off on an OPR whether it be a replacement or new add. If you are accountable then allow your people to make business decisions including financial, set budgets for the year, and hold people accountable to them. All these nuances highlight an overall lack of trust from the executive level for the people they hired to run the day-to-day.