Workiva is slowly moving away from a collaborative, constructive, and open workplace culture, to a more typical middle-management focused corporate structure. Over my tenure with the company, I have seen this shift demonstrated in the slow separation of executive leadership at the VP and C-suite levels from the individual contributors who actually do the work, with an ever-increasing interposition of middle managers. While some element of this is essential for scaling to a large business, this shift has not been proactively guided in a manner that suits the need of all members across the organization.
Whereas it used to be standard for leadership to frequently work directly with individuals across all levels of the corporate architecture, now middle managers take most of the face-time with leadership, and then return to leadership to take credit for the accomplishments of their subordinates. Furthermore, it is unfortunate that this is becoming ever-more-often coupled with a lack of understanding of the actual work on the part of managers and directors, such that they become an active detriment to efficiency.
There are still islands of good middle-management who do not operate this way, but as the company has scaled, executive leadership has not been proactive in removing the detrimental elements in the middle levels of the organization, and as such this shift has seen a definite directional trend, which I estimate will progress to completion where it becomes the new norm across the entire business.
With this in mind, I am actively looking for new opportunities at other places of work. If you are considering Workiva for employment, I encourage you to try to ask the hiring manager questions that probe for these problems (ie 'Can you share a time when you helped one of your team members get promoted?' or 'Can you walk me through an example of when you helped your team members build new skills and develop their careers?'). If the hiring manager cannot clearly and specifically demonstrate how they help build their team members up, I would proceed with caution.
