Where to begin. If there were an award for “Top Companies Fostering an Abusive Culture and Toxic Work Environment”, Polsineli would be the reigning champion.
On a daily basis I experienced being belittled, verbally abused and degraded by coworkers after working tirelessly to try and satisfy their endless flood of whiney demands. Brought it up to management with examples but nothing happened and the abuse continued. Fear tactics were often used, leaving you worried about job security. How is anyone supposed to effectively perform their job having that in the back of your mind in addition to coworkers belittling you day in and day out?!
Very little training was provided, but if you made any mistakes you were sure to be reprimanded. During “training”, necessary information was often intentionally withheld, leading to long standing issues to be drawn out for MONTHS, leaving me to take the heat. There was later a harassment incident that I reported to management, and again, it was never addressed so it continued.
The workload is unrealistic by far. You’re not allowed a minute of overtime, but you are expected to get 60 hours of work done in 40 hours. So what do you do? People end up working off the clock because you’ll get in trouble for not getting it done if you stop at 40 hours, but you’ll also get in trouble for logging the hours you need to work to get the job done. Again, brought the workload to the attention of management, I was told I should be able to do it, even though they admit they have no way of measuring the workload aside from us telling them.
No one can be the perfect employee, but I ran myself ragged trying to meet their impossible expectations and appease the egos of the “untouchable attorneys”. I deserved a heck of a lot better than what I was served at Polsinelli. I made every attempt to notify the proper channels of everything that was happening, and was turned away each time. HR is a joke, if you are below management level they aren’t interested in protecting you. It doesn’t matter what you do here, if you are on the outside of the Polsinelli inner circle, you will be pushed out. Being with a good company now, I have learned that all of this behavior is considered harassing and bullying in nature and should have been taken seriously. Do yourself a favor and keep looking, there’s a better company out there for you. This place is NOT worth the trauma.