A good mission poorly managed - Managing Associate bei Community Science: Mitarbeiterbewertung

Unfortunately, I did not see much evidence of Chavis and upper management extending the same standard of integrity to their employees. On the contrary, Chavis and his co-principals often communicated expectations to employees that were at odds with deeper (operating) expectations. For instance, CS uses a billable hours system with the stated expectation that 90% of an employee's hours should be billable. However, the reality was that the assignments often entailed many more hours than was billed (often the result of CS underbidding contracts). Thus, to stay on budget, employees like myself were pressured to work "off the clock," which amounted to hours that we could not count towards our 90% billable hours goal. This by itself would not necessarily be a problem so long as our non-billable hours was a reasonable amount. However, on top of billable work, we were expected to perform other duties and tasks such as professional development, grant-writing, and trouble-shooting issues that often resulted from poorly conceived and communicated tasks. These non-billable activites often totaled significantly more than 4 hours/week (10% in a 40 hour week). Employees were given an implicit choice: either work significantly more than 40 hours per week (55-65 hours/week is probably realistic) or fall short of goals. I perceived an imbalance in work and life among the owners and top management which they expected of the rest of us. If you are not married or have a a family and are willing to put in those kinds of hours, CS could be a good place to get your feet wet in the community development consulting world. Otherwise, I would look elsewhere. The fact is, CS is too small and the owners show little inclination to support your success in an environment where much of the turbulence originates among managers and owners unwilling or unable to own their role in those problems. For the employee, more or less, it's sink or swim. In addition to the problems already mentioned (e.g., underbidding contracts and communicating misleading expectations to employees), they include micromanagement and role confusion that often generate problems of their own.. Instead of owning their role in these problems, however, the owners routinely displaced the responsibility onto their employees. This in turn created an organizational culture plagued by lack of accountability and defensive posturing, exacerbated by Chavis' occasional angry outbursts and threats. The message that we employees got was: CS is pretty much a one-man show supported by an inner circle of co-principals. I for one, anyway, never felt really comfortable enough to share my professional opinions about our work or about the workplace. Despite my education and position in the company, I was not treated as colleague so much as a "mere employee." This company culture ironically stifles the kind of open discussion and learning required of an organization seeking to be on the cutting edge of a field. In my opinion, CS will probably find it hard to grown beyond its current size so long as Chavis holds a tight rein on his company. Prospective employees looking for growth potential should consider this as well.