Extremely High Workload for Extremely Low Pay vs Industry Standards: Company leadership described the recent department restructuring as “improving employee experience”. The discrepancy between that idea and the reality is frankly mind-boggling. Combining three jobs into one (moving from product-specific Account Managers to AMs serving all three products) with minimal training and no reduction in client book size has deteriorated both employee AND client experience. The current book size and workload expectations for AMs are laughable, especially when paired with compensation. No other agency has triple-digit standards for the number of orders/clients managed by a single AM. The recent high turnover rate of AMs who know how to effectively manage accounts and provide strong service is a direct result of unsustainable workloads/low pay. And unfortunately, clients truly suffer when employees are being pushed to the brink of production like this. They are receiving less attention, from less experienced AMs. The fact the CEO has stated that we AMs are “excited about” these changes leads me to believe he either A) truly has no idea what is going on at his company or B) he’s completely committed to putting lipstick on this pig. This change was also described by leadership as “resulting in employees earning more on average”. I found this humorous. The restructure rolled out 4/1 as planned, yet we still do not know what our new pay model is? We’ve been told that “we will be paid the same as last month” but moving forward our clients are going to be shuffled around…with no guarantee you will be made whole. LP is praised as a “great place to start a career” because anyone with an ounce of real work experience in this industry would be rightfully offended by the starting wages. This IS a great place… for people who don’t yet know their worth. If you are someone who happens to have previous experience, good luck getting compensated fairly. Even if you outperform peers, LP has baked a time-gate into any potential upward movement. So you will continue to be underpaid until you’ve put in your time dues. Unless of course, you are lucky enough to win the LP nepotism lottery and get put in a management role (“We promote from within” should have a footnote that adds “if you are friends with department leadership”). Lack of Transparency/Poor Change Management: Despite Employer comments to the contrary, it has been my experience that employees below department-level leadership are rarely, if ever, asked for feedback, and any feedback received is completely disregarded. Managers and Team Leads are informed of large, disruptive changes at the very last minute. This has consistently led to conflict and deteriorating trust among team members when their direct managers/leaders can’t address questions or concerns because they, too, were out of the loop. And let’s not forget about the toxic positivity. I know many managers/leads are trying their best to be good representatives of the company, but they can only fake it for so long before starting to slip and revealing their mutual feelings of dissatisfaction with recent changes. Smaller, related issue--Access to work-related information is a mess. We are continually told about changes being made to “make it easier to track things” but every department/team seems siloed and there is no cohesion. Some use Team Channels to communicate info, others leave it in individual chats, some things communicated only via email, some in SharePoint, some in Google Drive, and on and on. Finding or even having knowledge about the existence of documents useful to your workflow seems to be based on luck. The last comment I will make on this is related to People Operations: I have never before experienced such unprofessionalism from a Human Resources-adjacent department. Openly talking about other employees behind their backs and contributing to water-cooler gossip, the lack of professionalism is unreal.
