Within the last year, 50% of the design team have either been laid off or left. For a company that proudly boasts a positive work culture, the employee retention rate is abysmally low. Konrad group hires young, impressionable, straight out of college employees and promotes annually. While being promoted annually may sound enticing, it’s often without merit and a apart of the business effort to retain employees. It’s not an approach that works. What this in turn leads to are team members who lack leadership experience pressing unrealistic timelines, chaotic workloads and have low emotional intelligence.
As a woman in the workplace, I sadly felt like I could not thrive. Leaderships inability to present themselves as an authentic, constant and consistent role model truly trickles from the top perpetuating a very negative work culture. A different review on Glassdoor wrote that it often feels like a boys club, this is in fact true. Management and senior leadership in the New York office are predominately white males - there is no diversity, which is also a major red flag. When you leave Konrad, you’re silenced and asked to keep your resignation notice a secret amongst your team. It’s a disturbingly odd practice. The lack of common human decency to celebrate an individual persons choice to move on is appalling, but what is even more disturbing are the weekly emails that read as an obituary when employees are fired without reason.
In regards to benefits, don’t be fooled by the benefit offer of 20 days of PTO. What they do not disclose is 5 days of the 20 being offered is apart of the company holiday shut down. Sick days, which New York State requires at least 40 hours, are also baked into this 20 day package. You are technically being offered 7 days of PTO on an accrued basis.