Pros
Hands down, the people (not in management) are the best people to work with. And, depending on department and manager, experience will differ wildly from other employees. I've had the fortune to work with one of the better managers at Paro, one who actively supported and encouraged me to do my best. The unlimited PTO/work from home policies (again, depending on manager) is great and sets employees up for a solid work/life balance.
Cons
Honestly, not sure where to start here. Many people say that growing pains of a startup are commonplace, and usually, I would agree. However, these growing pains are caused by a stubborn refusal to learn and grow for those in the leadership team, as well as the middle management team. Typically, employees join startups for a lower salary because of the learning opportunities that they provide, such as a chance to step into a role that would be slightly beyond reach at another company, to explore how an employee can best contribute their highest potential... Or allowing employees to bring up ideas to members of leadership they wouldn't otherwise have access to. Employment is a two-way relationship, one that should benefit both employer and employee, and it is here that Paro fails to deliver in both learning opportunities and voice. In addition to that, career advancement paths are misleading and strung out unnecessarily. Many employees were lured here under the premise that they would soon be able to move up and advance their career quickly. This is not the case. As opposed to other workplaces, where excelling in your current line of work is a signal that you are ready to take on other challenges; here at Paro, employees need to prove their value in the aspired role while still excelling at their current role, before they can be even considered (and ultimately denied) their promotion. Placing unnecessary hurdles and roadblocks for employees trying to advance and grow is a very negative and anti-employee culture that I did not approve of during my time here. When this conversation is moved to the People Team, employees have been told out right that career advancement is just not realistic at the company. Sales leadership has little real-world experience in non-transactional strategy, but refuses to learn from more experienced employees on the team. For a majority of employees, the trust between them and their manager is close to nonexistent. Leadership tends to be suffocating and micromanaging, which also indicates a lack of trust in the employees. For a company that seems to pride itself on the caliber of people they hire, sales managers for some reason, no longer trust the employees once hired to do the job that they were hired to do. Disregarding previous expertise, success, and personal work styles, all sales must conform to doing things exactly the way leadership wants it done. These "best practices" preached by leadership are not best practices that stem from a long sales career, or extensive research in sales strategy. These best practices stem from the sales leaders themselves. Sales leaders also dip into other departments to micromanage employees who are not even their direct reports. There is also severe favoritism within the sales organization. Some AEs who have performed similarly to AEs that have been put on performance plans... have never been put a plan simply because of their relationship with the manager. AEs that have hit quota more often, but that are less-liked, have been put on performance plans after ONE month of lesser performance. This favoritism is not contained just within the sales organization, but also within the leadership team. There's also a certain issue I would like to address as a woman. Many times, when working with a few male leadership team members and male sales leadership, I would often feel steamrolled; my ideas would be dismissed quite easily. When I did bring up this issue, I was told to perhaps alter my communication styles (aka avoid the person) so that I could work better. I disagree; all employees should learn how to work with others, no matter what work style or personality they have, most importantly those in leadership. The inability for leadership to empathize with other perspectives is demonstrative of how stubborn they can be--and how negligent they can be about diversity in the workforce. The CEO, when asked what upcoming initiatives employees could expect regarding Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion responded by saying how the employee seemed to care more about that topic than he, and proposed that the employee charter that themselves.
