Merit pay is almost non-existent. Bonuses unheard of. The salary merit increases every year do not keep up with the rising cost of living and inflation, and actually comes out to be a net pay cut each year when factoring in the increasing cost of the company's benefits packages. I have watched friends with comparable education and background increase their salaries to a ten-fold degree when compared to LexisNexis.
There is a complete and utter lack of any sort of career path or long-term vision for the growth and advancement of employees. That cuts across nearly all career paths. Most training that the company offers is either tech-centric and offered only to employees within certain high-profile teams, or dealing entirely with "soft-skills" or the more mandatory, HR-type topics. There is very little in the way of training for employees who would like to learn additional interdisciplinary skills or become futurists in their field that apply to work both inside and outside the company. Management does a poor job of sourcing and recommending worthwhile training for employees that are interested in professional growth. If you ask the question, "How can I improve and learn and grow?", it will be met with either an honest shoulder-shrug or a well-recited reference to the company's very underwhelming, aforementioned internal training portal.
Very little is put into the budget in the way of pure employee appreciation. The annual holiday party was cut from being one held at a huge venue downtown where spouses were invited, the company provided a free catered dinner, bar, raffle, and DJ, to one that happened during a Thursday workday, outside the office, without any family invites, and one where community service projects were undertaken in the name of the company's brand. It was a universally-panned slap in the face. Don't get me wrong, community service is great and vital to the furthering of community ties and the pursuit of the company's vision, but it should not be conflated, combined, or confused with simply appreciating and celebrating your employees for the hard work and effort they put in every day. Anything else steals the deserved spotlight from a job well done.
Additional responsibilities and assignments are regularly doled out by managers who have either no ability or no intention to provide additional compensation to their workers for this additional work. This, along with the fact that there is about a 1% pay increase difference between the highest achievers and lowest achievers means that complacency is widely tolerated and people begin to dread or actively avoid such new assignments. This general toleration of complacency, coupled with a non-existent career path to promotion, wears on motivated and high achieving employees until they either become complacent themselves, or find a better external opportunity and leave the company.
The company does provide recognition for some achievements, but to my knowledge, this does not come with any pay increase or bonus, and this recognition only goes to members of teams who have proactive managers or their entire team located at a particular site.
Most of the best and brightest employees leave within a short time, because they are not encouraged and empowered to grow. I began my career with the company as someone who was motivated and completely on-board with the company's mission of advancing the rule of law, but over my tenure I have come to realize that the company does not really care about the well being, professional growth, and financial advancement of its employees and that this completely undercuts its effectiveness at pursuing this mission. Upper management intentionally and repeatedly dodges concerns about lack of career pathing and salary growth, by deferring to lower management and reciting rehearsed corporatese. Questions about where recent savings from corporate rate tax cuts would go was met with a vague answer about "corporate debt service." Employees are smart enough to know that this money could have just as easily gone into their pockets to make up for underwhelming merit in past years. When workers have worked hard to attend expensive universities and graduate programs, and are expected to live in an area with increasing living cost, but the company's wages do not remain competitive for the industry or the area, people leave. Employees have student loans, mortgages, and children. Giving employees all the vacation days in the world means nothing if they do not earn enough money to take a decent vacation every once in a while.
Many of the people in the office self-segregate into groups centered around their particular product or project area, or otherwise have their own pre-established cliques. I am painfully aware every day that I am not a part of one of those groups, and not a part of the prevailing "techie" culture at the office, and I have felt increasingly isolated and marginalized. Much of this is due to the company's reliance upon conferencing software and Skype meetings with little personal face-to-face interaction. I barely know the people I directly work with, because all interaction I have with them is via technology.
The culture is severely lacking. Most people who work within a 50 foot radius of me could not tell you my first name without looking at my nametag. Employees do not care much about corporate do-gooding or cheap soda and pinball machines, or the occasional meeting with beer and wine (an aside to management--as a millenial, I feel demeaned and insulted when management of the site/company thinks/assumes that all millenials want to do is sip craft beer and code in hoodies and flip flops and do not aspire to be high achievers and earn salaries that are in accordance with their level of education and high achievement, or that they are too aloof to know when they aren’t being valued). All employees (yes, including us in-demand, tech-savvy millenials) want a culture where they feel respected as professionals and empowered to actually contribute to the company's direction, feel motivated to work hard because their work will be recognized and compensated, feel connected to the growth of the company, and trust in and experience a truth that the company's success will be their own success. The current culture is one in which employees are clearly treated like a commodity and are merely kept satiated by almost insultingly modest pay increases, the ability to work from home, occasional catering, cheap (but yet, somehow, not free) soda, and an XBox in the break room. It does not reward or compensate hard workers, intelligent people, or attract the best and brightest minds, who are smart enough to go where they are wanted. The company does nothing above the bare minimum in regards to their oft-recited core value of "valuing our people."
Corporate will tout "work-life balance" but in my opinion, there is a poor work-life balance. It is ideally a balance, but workers primarily want to work hard, get ahead, make more money for their families, advance in their careers, and carry out a grand purpose or mission in their work. The company provides options to "work from home" or have core hours or things of this nature. They give tons of PTO. This is to ensure they do not have to pay the high achievers the high salaries they deserve, and to have a leg to stand on when talking about the ever-shrinking salaries. For those who are hungry and motivated in their careers, there is a bit too much "life" in the work-life balance, and this tends to make people complacent in their careers. Most of the employees have put their time and money into acquiring useful and expensive skills in order to work hard and become high achievers and earn a great living. They didn't put all this effort in just to have more PTO and the ability to work from home while earning a truly underwhelming salary for the skills they labored to develop.
