Having lots of management experience across many companies in Massachusetts and New England, I know that it’s normal for people to work hard and put in a solid forty-five hours per week, but in my almost twenty year career, I had never before worked for a company like this. The company’s customers are almost all military and government programs and rather than a civilian employer and a collegiate environment, senior management wanted people to sacrifice their nights and weekends to the company and expected service rather than employment. Many people were very angry and it was a bit scary a few times. For several years with a few different small to large companies, I have been telecommuting and working from my home office one or two days per week, but the company is very immature with telecommuting and had a “look over your shoulder” mentality.
As an exempt, degreed professional, familiar with very collegiate and collaborative civilian employers, I found the atmosphere of fire drills and many late nights and weekends to be challenging. I wanted to plan my projects and properly estimate, but senior management wanted me to pressure my people to work seventy or more hours each week and to generally take on far more work than we could properly plan or staff. Given the hours, the pay and benefits weren’t good. I had to deal with several situations in which highly skilled, degreed professional people voiced strong dissatisfaction with the fact that they could work the same number of hours in a relatively unskilled retail or food service position and make more money. Human Resources was very difficult to deal with and, per policies and senior management pressure, did not recognize highly skilled resources as being critical and valuable or the incredible challenge associated with finding and retaining them.
Much of senior and mid-management were ex-military and were focused on peoples' past military service and undervalued people’s education, skill-set and daily performance. I’ve always worked for civilian companies and had never wanted to be in a government job or the military, but felt like I had somehow joined the military. I felt like I was trying to conquer my colleagues and teams rather than collaborate with them. Meeting with the customers was very strange. I’m very familiar and skilled with being sensitive to and delivering to the customer’s needs but I had never before had customers try to take over and lead my meetings and manage my people and dictate what they would be paid.
Everyone seemed to be arguing with everyone else, challenging, submitting or conquering and everyone was a subordinate of superior, rather than a colleague. I felt that what I was being pressured into doing was fundamentally wrong and had to leave. A very few people in senior management were without a doubt working around forty hour weeks and getting huge salaries and perks, but most others seemed to be very dissatisfied with their work and pay and many told me that they needed more time with their families. The environment was challenging and the desired schedules and budgets were impossible to meet without pressuring everyone to work and travel long weeks, late nights and weekends.
