Pros
- Super nice building - Great, fun, talented, hardworking people on the front lines
Cons
- Management does not communicate with their teams at all. You will not have skip levels, you will not review your manage, no one will take or use your feedback, this is not a collaborative environment whatsoever. Management lays down the law so they only have themselves to blame for their repeated failures. - Communication between departments, between managers and their teams, and just across the company is consistently nonexistent. Lots of siloing of information so when someone leaves, their knowledge is lost because it was never shared or documented. And often service teams are given completely conflicting information on what our policies our, which leads to frustration and confusion among our advisors. - Kestra is critically understaffed. In 12 months, the concierge team of what started at 18 people lost 10 people. More than half!! Management waited until it was an extraordinarily critical and untenable situation to start aggressively hiring. And they blamed hold times on the remaining team members, saying we were just inefficient and needed to work harder. We literally couldn't get up to go to the bathroom without getting skypes from managers that we needed to stay on the phone. Most call centers have a percentage wrap/idle or unavailable time that is expected of their staff, which is reasonable. At Kestra they got rid of post call work all together! You had to go straight from call to call without so much as getting a sip of your coffee, and if you had notes to add, items to research, questions for other departments, service requests to submit---well all those are supposed to magically get done after hours. - There is no accountability with management. They will always find a fall guy among the boots on the ground. It's really disappointing. Management 100% does not lead by example - Training is a joke. The few resources available are all outdated, completely unusable by new hires. There is no system or rhyme or reason to it. If you don't encounter a topic or issue while shadowing, you will learn through trial and error and there will be no leniency for you not knowing something that you were never trained on. It's all trial by fire for sure. - James Poer does not care about his people on the front lines. He basically says it outright to our faces at every quarterly meeting and we all laugh about how ridiculous it is, but the proof is in the pudding. The top down attitude is that they do not care about their employees and it is pervasive to the "culture" of Kestra. - You will never get support from your manager. If an advisor is angry, you are at fault no matter what, even if you gave correct information and no matter how gently you handled the situation. They are so fast to throw you under the bus and never stand up for you. That include your manager vouching for you to THEIR manager. Again, they can't pin it on a fall guy fast enough.
