Benson Reviews

- I wasn’t even two weeks in and I received a mass e-mail about folks working five minutes overtime. Never in the history of my work life have I ever been warned about working five more minutes than normal, and if you do reach five minutes, you are expected to monitor your time daily to clock in later or give your lunch extra minutes. I believe this truly sets the tone for how all new employees feel when they start: you are nothing more than a commodity. - Nepotism is a huge thing here. Promotions and hiring are really on a family and friends basis. That means growth based on merit isn’t likely. If you are coming from the outside, don’t expect serious growth here. - Workload is probably the biggest issue, and even if you are successful with your work and pace, they just give you more work. There’s very little incentive to even do your best after a certain point, and often what happens is people quit. The company overall has a serious turnover issue for this reason and can’t seem to keep people long-term, and I’ve confirmed this by reaching out to those who have left. Even within my first two weeks, someone was so overwhelmed that they quit on their lunch break. I didn’t understand why at the time, but after a year, I finally understand why that person did what they did. They try to sell you on cross-training and teamwork during the interview, but the truth they won’t tell you is that the workload is constantly overwhelming for everybody, and not everybody really knows how to do all the jobs. There’s no time for training, and if you or anyone else takes time off, the balance of workload for everyone collapses and chaos ensues. Only one person was consistently able to help me at the pace I needed. Instead of addressing or reflecting on this workload issue, you’ll just get “do your best” or “ask for help” and chances are, the only person able to help you likely needs as much help as you do. Why is there so much workload? Because they push impossible expectations to satisfy customers and ask questions later. They refuse to truly address the staff and workload ratio for the entire year I’ve been there. - In addition to the workload, I had to do two jobs for more than half the year since that person quit. Once again, failing to fill their roles is difficult because the workload overwhelms everybody. I knew that better than anyone because I literally trained person after person for an entire year. This isn’t a problem in itself considering the current worker shortage, but they failed to truly acknowledge my ability to balance two difficult jobs for an extended period. I worked this entire year hoping they’d compensate me in some way or at least have someone from the executive team personally thank me, but it never happened, and things continued as normal. I was even told they’d reconsider hiring new people because I was saving them money with my pace. They do not reward, incentivize, or value hard work whatsoever. They talk about performance-based raises, but the amount was no higher than a raise I'd get just for sticking around at any other job. I was told it was the best they could do. - They have a culture of blame, and no one wants to talk about it. The real problem is that their processes are flawed, but when you point that out, nothing gets done. They don’t care to improve their systems and processes; they just care about who to assign blame to. Once, I was ordered in a meeting to perform a task urgently. I did exactly as ordered per the authority of someone above me. It turned out to be a bad decision and upset customers, and suddenly the blame was rested on… me. Want to know what the response was when I pointed out it was ordered from a person in authority in urgency? I should have questioned the decision in the middle of a meeting. There is zero accountability on anybody at the top even if they make the decisions for you. I never trusted them since. Another example is when I brought up the performance-based raise that was supposedly the best they could possibly do for me. I brought it up as a reason for being dissatisfied and leaving. The focus was more about me not complaining about it rather than the fact that they saw a situation of an employee working two jobs for one year and getting essentially nothing for it. If a company can't naturally recognize talent and hardwork themselves and would rather tell you that you should have told them you deserved it, they have a serious accountability issue and don't understand employee retention as well as they say they do. - Speaking of management and executives, they’re severely detached from the frontline workers. That’s why their decision-making is so puzzling. They don't understand what the roles entail, and processes change like flavor of the week based on hyper reactions to customer complaints. One week it’s one policy, the next week it’s back to normal. There is no consistency or direction other than please the customers or executives. Their training regimen is essentially hope they have someone stick around long enough to tell you how to do the job verbally, because their training documents are outdated from all the random changing over the years. They never listened about the processes and only cared about how they look to the executives. Every single piece of feedback or idea was dismissed until it was too late and then suddenly, it’s a good idea. I never, ever felt empowered to truly speak and give my opinion. I once brought that to their attention and the response was, “Well, I don’t know why you don’t feel empowered, and I don’t know how to make you feel empowered.” I suppose process fixing isn't this company’s forte. I think what was ultimately lacking was the emotion and connection part of leadership. I would voice my opinions about workload, flawed processes, and other general frustrations but it felt like being a toddler talking to an adult. You get a pat on the head and a gentle push back to the same conditions, because there was almost always an excuse on why nothing could change. Or worse, you'd get a promise for change but it never actually comes. I tried to literally give them a year, and the workload and frustrations only deteriorated. The experience really just felt like working for a figurehead. Everybody just tuned out the talk from managers and did what they thought was best, because usually the ideas and perceptions they had about the roles were worthless compared to the insane amount of workload and expectations. - They may show efforts to improve work and life balance and improve employee morale, but so as long as the workload issue persists in all areas of the company (there isn’t a single frontline department not going through workload issues. I've asked), all those extra-curricular activities do is take time away from addressing their unrealistic expectations. So, they contradict their efforts by maintaining the same unrealistic expectations that push the employees beyond their limits while also sometimes forcing them to attend extra-curriculars for the sake of saying they’re trying to care about employees.