Advantage SCI Reviews

Not many, atleast nothing Advantage's fault

This company is an absolute joke. Im not even sure where to start. You get 5 hours of PTO per pay period and it accumulates as you start. That accumulated PTO will have to be used for your personal time off, sick time, government closures, and inclement weather closure. If you start at the company at the beginning of winter, and there happens to be a few snow closures, you will be forced to use your PTO. If you are new and have no PTO, you will never have the chance to accumulate PTO. If OPM calls for a delayed opening you will be expected to arrive to work on time as the “government delays are not applicable to contractors”. If you have Covid or are exposed to someone with covid and have to quarantine, you will for forced to use your PTO until it is gone. Once that happens all time off with be considered leave without pay (LWOP). They offer no assistance as far as time off for covid, even though at one point there were definetly options available though the government. When I started, Christmas Eve was declared a federal holiday (executive order) and there was so much back and forth and contradicting emails sent to us regarding that situation. We received an email that read “The presidents executive order is not applicable”. What does that even mean? What part is not applicable because if the building is closed contractors are not going to be able to work. The back and forth they send before actually finding out an answer makes them look so messy as a company. We ended up being forced to use our PTO for that holiday off. My issue with this is we should not be forced to use our PTO for situations that are out of our control. If there is a snow day or a random day is declared a holiday, why are we not allowed to just use LWOP if we want to save our PTO for an actual vacation instead of draining it without having a chance to save it. (forget about them paying you for that stuff as that would never happen) During the year of 2020 we were told they were not doing annual reviews that year because the company suffered so badly and was hit with COVID. Kid you not, the next day we received a news letter from upper management (or whoever puts them together) that the company was thriving even in the unprecedented times. After my annual review I was told a raise is not a guarantee and the company rewards employees in other ways like bonuses, time off, or a raise. it’s insulting giving the circumstances that I was not provided with a raise. The pay schedule is my next big issue with the company. We get paid two times per month, but it is not the same days each month. The dates we get paid on always vary, which makes it very difficult to plan for bills. There are companies with millions of employees that can manage to pay their employees on the same day every week or the same days in a month (pending the pay schedule). Not sure why a smaller company has such a random and sporadic pay schedule. Sometimes the way the months fall it will be three weeks before we are paid again. Another issue I have is it is very common to work 88-96 hours per pay period, but we will always get paid for only 80 of those hours because we are “salary”. We are “salary” but if there is a day we miss due to snow closure or something and have less than 80 hours, our pay will reflect that and be less than our normal pay. How come the fact that we are “salary” isn’t reflected with those situations? The way the Corporate Manager chooses to speak and interact with employees is one of the most unprofessional things i’ve ever witnessed. The company goes through Program Managers quite frequently because I feel like they can only be as good as the people above them. Because of upper managements lack of care, professionalism, and consistency I feel like any Program Manager who enters this role will never succeed. My next big issue I have with this company: The contract I was working on starting to do shifts due to covid and there was two different shift options. There was no mention of this when I was being hired or in the process of being hired. When I first arrived to work the new job, I arrived and the government employees were doing a shift schedule. This is 100% something the company should have told me prior to me starting work, but I have a feeling they didn’t because they knew I wouldn’t want to work 4am-12pm. Another issues I had with the shift situation was how it was all handled by the company. We got a call at 8pm on a friday that we were to report to work at 4am the following Monday. They always told us things so late and unprofessionally. They said our leadership was aware (they were not, they spoke with a different sections leadership) I believe the government was paying the company much more than the $5 extra they were giving us for differential pay. I understand this is a company and the idea is to make money but they were not the ones dealing with the extremely difficult circumstances, so a little more compensation would have been better. They did give us a very generous gift though for all of our hard work and the extreme inconvenience of shift work, a $10 Chick fil a gift card. The company has not once done anything for its employees in any sense of the word. All that seems to matter is them squeezing every cent out of us as possible. There was a time when the contract was ending and they were unsure if they were going to win it. The company hired about 4-5 new people weeks before the contract was set to end. The company never told these people that quit a job to come work for them, that they might not even win the contract and it was ending in just weeks. (I know in the contracting world, the new contract generally keeps the employees but this is about the point of the situation) I’ve been with the company just over a year, and in that time 7 employees have left. I feel like that is very telling that this company can also not seem to keep employees very long. I could continue on and list probably twenty more examples of petty, unprofessional, and less than ideal examples but I believe my main points above cover some major issues I had with this company.