It's been a few months since I've left and it's really become apparent how toxic the office environment is there. Team Leads are exploited for their labor - they are salary, but all the benefit of that arrangement goes to the company; Team Leads still have to work crazy shifts, holidays, precious little flexibility, vacations denied for silly reasons, it is looked down on to request comp time for meetings outside of shift/overtime. There should be some benefit to the employee when moving to salary, but it's clear that the company was just looking for unpaid overtime and that's the focus. Although I will say that at the time I left, they were making baby steps and allowing TL's to take half days from time to time and comp time if our overtime hours became excessive (although this was open to interpretation by direct managers) - that is how it should be, so good on them!!
There was also a weird amount of competition between some of the TL's that was encouraged from the top - rather than working together toward common goals, it was very much about getting ahead at any cost. This resulted in more than one really tense meeting with people shouting - quite bizarre in a professional environment and wholly unnecessary. Some TL's did thrive in that kind of environment - if you're a competitive person by nature or prefer to work individually over teamwork, this could be a great fit for you.
It was also a bit disturbing how the (unspoken) expectation was for every employee to have the same personality - employees were indeed evaluated on this quarterly (the company values, which are great on paper, were often interpreted as teamwork = loud and talkative) and this was also a consideration for who to promote internally. If you already fit into this mold, great! If you are at all reserved/reflective, this will likely be viewed as a flaw.
There was also quite a bit of mixed messaging around metrics - although we were told that the focus was moving toward coaching to the right behaviors, there was still in practice a huge amount of pressure to meet metrics. This was confusing and made it difficult to manage teams.
Additionally, I didn't feel particularly protected as an employee - it seemed the agents were able to speak to us however they wanted with no recourse. Don't get me wrong - most of the agents were so wonderful and I'm not so thin skinned that I can't take standard criticism between a Team Lead and their direct report, but when I start to feel unsafe being alone in the same room as one of my agents, there needs to be some recourse or protection for the TL.
My impression that a lot of these issues are unique to the Bellevue office. Booking is a great company overall, they do great things and really work hard to support their employees and make it a great place to work.
