-Work Life Balance can vary from group to group. Some groups consistently leave at 5 while others stay late into the night
-An unclear compensation structure. How people are compensated both in salary and bonus is formulated in a black box, where it seems year after year management finds new ways to restrict what’s paid back to employees
-An hourly billable system is used for fixed fee projects and business units. This doesn’t make sense. Time is wasted on truing up time entered in the system and reconciling back to the flat fees we invoice clients.
-No system is currently in place which weighs different business units with consideration to what they typically receive on a per job basis. Different business units can work equally hard for a $20,000 job versus a $10,000 job, yet no consideration is given to the amount of effort put forth to achieve the revenue, even if the hours spent are the same. Different business units can only charge what the market allows, yet management cares only to the fee invoiced at the end of the day.
-Utilization is used as a measuring stick for compensation. Often times, utilization does not translate to actual work put in or efforts to get job done. Quality or timeliness of completed jobs isn’t always included in a utilization number. High utilization as compared to others is often the result of higher fees, which in turn enables employees to look as though they’ve worked harder when it’s far from reality. If you work for a managing director who attracts certain clients who will pay less for similar jobs, the staff and VPs are punished as their billable time looks poor as compared to other offices. In turn, this just means staff and VPs have to work twice as hard as other offices in order to achieve the same amount of revenue. What’s realistic for one office in terms of revenue might not be for others in the same service line, yet no consideration is given to that.
-Unrealistic service line budgets are established, which only means bonus pools get cut year. Have we ever stopped to understand why budgets are missed year after year? I believe this to be a result of unrealistic expectations which provide management with an excuse to cut bonuses. Just because the service line had their best year in 2015, doesn’t necessarily mean 5% compounded service line revenue growth actually makes sense.
