Terrible Management - Toxic Work Environment - Administrative Assistant Copia Resources Employee Review

The owner of the company is by far, the most unprofessional person I've ever worked with. When I was hired, I learned this company faced high turnover rates and I can see why. He frequently would drink alcohol in the office, and scream at people over the phone, in full view of his other employees. If he got angry about anything at all, he would get emotional and complain very loudly to everyone else in the office. Normally in an office environment, I would expect that if one is angry or stressed, they would try to deal with it in a more professional manner, maybe take a walk to cool off, etc. The fact that the owner of the company had frequent emotional angry outbursts, was a huge red flag. Once I heard some very negative and offensive language directed at a person of color, from him over the phone. The language he used to describe other people in general, was very negative, and it seemed that he believed he was better than most people. I'm not sure why. All of his employees were also extremely intelligent and hardworking, so I didn't understand why he was so disrespectful. In addition, the deadlines he imposed on his employees made no sense. He would create completely unrealistic deadlines and have high expectations of all employees, but anytime an employee would try to communicate anything to him, they would be ignored, myself included. There were numerous times when I politely asked for clarification on an assignment (none of my coworkers knew what he wanted either) and I received no information. Yet the deadline would still be unrealistic and I was left trying to figure out what he wanted. After about one month of me being employed here, he sent an email to all employees essentially telling them that if there was work to be done, they were expected to stay at the office until it was done. At this point, all of us in the office were staying at least 10 hours per day. We were literally working 10 hour days to try to keep up with his expectations, every day. To receive this type of email was extremely disrespectful, considering how much work we were already doing. We never received a thank you, or any gratitude from upper management. There was no work life balance. The owner himself has children, and would frequently bring his children to the office at times, or bring female friends to the office. This was very disrespectful in my opinion, only because that would never ever be allowed for any of us employees. We certainly couldn't bring our kids to the office, or bring friends etc. We weren't even encouraged to use our vacation time etc let alone ask for anything like that. It was just a very unprofessional office atmosphere. He essentially treated this company as if he were king of the castle, and could do whatever he wanted, but none of us could even come close to asking for anything like that so it was hypocritical. There were many situations that I also feel were handled in a very unprofessional, disorganized manner. There were scenarios where some customers were really hurting and needing their waste services changed quickly, and I would propose a simple solution that would save the customer money and time. Yet we always needed to go with his solution, even if it didn't make sense, even if literally everyone in the office disagreed. There was one scenario where he essentially screwed one of his customers out of money and the customer ended up paying 200$ extra per month for their waste services, and it didn't make sense because that extra $200 didn't even go to Copia Resources. It was a situation where you couldn't question his authority, he just believed he always knew what was best, and he really didn't. I ended up feeling really bad for some of their customers. To be honest I'm not quite sure how the company is still in business, they have a decent amount of clients but in terms of money I couldn't see how they were making much profit after expenses. This was an incredibly stressful position due to his personality, disorganization of upper management, and company culture. He essentially IS the company culture. No one can really say no to him, which is ultimately why I left. I knew I wouldn't be able to learn anything at this company. I can honestly say I've never experienced anything like this before in my career. I've previously worked at many other companies, including large corporate companies, and smaller companies, and I've dealt with many other management styles and never had even the slightest problem with anyone.