FWD.us Reviews

The cons greatly outweigh the pros, and here is why: - Expectation/ownership/process: This is somewhat expected of nonprofits, but the processes here relating to accomplishing any type of projects are never clearly defined. Almost a year in, I'm still constantly having to clarity processes / expectations for recurring projects, because they're always in flux. There is no actual ownership of things you get to do , because EVERY LITTLE THING needs to be approved by leadership. I'm talking about simple graphics for social media that has pre-defined copy and style, and very very small changes and updates to our sites/products. To me it seems like there's a micromanagement style coming from leadership, and to me it feels a distrust of employees. Even for approvals, there is unclear expectations as to who is supposed to approve what type of project in the leadership circle. Overall very very chaotic ways of accomplishing things. - Accountability: there is no clear accountability measures to make sure people do the work they're supposed to be doing. It's very loosely managed how people are spending their time, what projects they're working on, as well as followups - Organization structure: Roles aren't being clearly defined, and unclear how roles fit into the entire organization. Some of the roles in the org are not comparable to similar titles at other organizations. - Unclear goals / metrics: The org does not have clear goals or metrics by which it measures its success. This trickles down to teams where it's very unclear what we need to measure or what we should be improving on. This translates to not understanding what kind of impact our work is actually making in the world. - Compensation: not surprising, but it's a nonprofit who does not pay market rate. Our interns/seasonal employees are not being paid that well, and even more senior ICs get paid pretty poorly. It's par for the course for a nonprofit but nevertheless disappointing. - No path for growth: I'm never feeling like I'm challenged at work. Everything feels super easy and there's no clear goals/structure in place for projects that are slightly challenging or big projects. There are no clear paths for growth or clear descriptions of what you're supposed to be able to do/achieve at a certain level in the company. - Unproductive meetings/processes: Other folks in the org constantly get in my way of trying to accomplish things. Project managers getting in my way of doing things, telling me what I need to do when I'm already doing it etc. Seems like nobody knows what they're doing. Meetings are usually a waste of time as most of our meetings are incredibly unstructured, have no goals/next steps, and people tend to go on long tangents that have nothing to do with what's being discussed. - Lack of basic professional etiquette: This may be because a lot of folks on the team are young, but there seems to be a lack of understanding of basic professional etiquette. People love to cancel meetings with no warning, taking up time in meetings to talk about irrelevant topics, not being able to clearly communicate in an effective way etc. - Overwork: this is both due to not having efficient processes, and also not having enough staff. There are times where I had to work 12 days straight in order to push out the launch of a project. There are some folks on the team doing the job of 2 or more people. - Hiring process: relating to above, we hire a lot of interns on various teams, and they never seem to convert to full time roles even when we needed them. We spent a lot of time interviewing for certain roles and never filling them--as if we have no idea what kind of people we're looking for. Even in cases where interns have converted to longer term employees, they're converted to seasonal versus immediately full time. - Work structure: There seems to be a confusion across the org regarding whose job it is to do what. People seem to be confused about who to reach out to on what topics in all areas of any project. Not sure why there's such a confusion. - Poor management: leadership seems to think that most staff are outright stupid. There's a culture of talking to us with kids gloves on on various topics. Meetings can drag on and on while sr managers / leadership will talk about what they think is important, with no regard to people's time. There's a recurring weekly meeting where we all share out what we're working on, even though it's all written out, just so a senior manager can have a pulse of what's going on in the org. Generally I feel a sense of being patronized when senior leadership talks to us. - No transparency / top down structure: For such a small nonprofit, there's A LOT OF top-down processes where we're always waiting for "guidance" from senior leadership. There are a lot of silos going on where it's very hard to understand all the information relating to executing on a project, which makes it very hard to do my job.