8y
Ryan Petersen here, CEO and founder of Flexport. Thank you for taking the time to provide feedback.
While I appreciate your perspective, I find your claims unfair to the Flexporters who work so hard and create so much value for our customers and for each other everyday.
Our engineering teams are making incredible progress toward automating the process of capturing all the data required in global trade, as well all the routine tasks that have to happen to ship goods across the planet.
Until we've fully standardized, digitized, and automated all the processes involved in global trade we will have many roles that involve data entry and other types of repetitive work. However, we are always clear with candidates about the nature of the work they'll be doing, and we score highly on culture surveys when we ask our team if the job meets their expectations set during the recruiting process.
I’m sorry you feel we don’t care about our employees. I can assure you that’s not true. Indeed, it's because we care so much about our people that we hire entry level people into roles that are closer to customers and where decisions are being made, rather than in offshore business process outsourcing operations. While many people's first job at Flexport will involve data entry and other repetitive tasks, we hire them onto cross-functional squads so they get exposure to other roles including operations, customer service, sales, customs compliance, and all the various modes of transportation we support.
We create many career advancement opportunities for employees through a variety of programs, and people who have started in entry level jobs have moved across the world to build teams and open offices for us. Our most notable program, the Global Rotational Program, encourages high performers at every level of the company to move to a new geography or function.
Because our culture relies so heavily on cross-functional teams, and because our mission is so global, we value well-rounded generalists who can move seamlessly across disciplines and geographies. That requires major investments in training and mobility infrastructure, which we continue to make. These programs and investments create tremendous career development for our people at every level of the organization.
Beyond the official programs of our people operations group, if you spend a little time with us you'll see that team members at Flexport really do care about each other, from me as CEO all the way through our 11 offices around the world. Most of us who've been here more than a year or two feel like Flexport is our second family, full of people we love and trust.
At Flexport one of our core values is "fill the gap" because we believe in growth mindsets, experimental discovery, and assisting others when they try things outside their comfort zones in pursuit of growth. You see that everyday, as Flexporters work hard to help each other get better, learn faster, and do more to create value for our clients.
And on the subject of transparency, it's worth noting that I wrote my thesis in graduate school about radical transparency in the workplace. You can read it here, and I'm proud to say that ten years on, you can see almost every element of that philosophy thriving in Flexport's culture:
https://medium.com/@typesfast/out-of-control-by-design-6f7934498c54
