Despite the learning opportunities and passion within the company, burnout is INCREDIBLY high within the company. Even when you do want to start experimenting outside your role and make waves in your professional development, you better be prepared to give up much of your personal time and drown. For what? A pat on the back and no true team recognition and appreciation? There is no lunch break for employees and many team members are often working through lunch/skipping meals in order to balance their crushing workloads. Many people are staying 10-12 hours a day in order to manage the crushing workload, trying to learn new skills to meet clients ever growing demands (i.e. new project management skills, new design tools, etc.) as Barrel gains new clients but refuses to expand the team. There is also no respect for work life balance: partners and seniors texting during weekends, late nights and even holidays in order for you to be "on" and working on issues and being upset when you don't devote your personal time to giving an immediate response. Especially the producers who feel the majority of the heat from partners and clients. For producers, the partners do almost nothing to shield and protect producers, who strive incredibly hard to make sure clients abide to SOWs; partners often let clients abuse the team hours and project timelines, leading to a an overall financial loss, conflicts between different projects and staffing, in order to keep "high priority clients" and save face.
Additionally, there is very little team cohesion between the general employees and partners and whatever cohesion there is feels fabricated and forced: a common phenomenon is for people to smile in the face to the partners at Bourbon Fridays, but go out to drinks with co workers after where they truly vent and let out how frustrated and underappreciated they feel. Many within the company are afraid to speak up to the partners and the newly created senior roles as, often times, those who voice their opinions are trash talked by the partners in the weekly partner meeting and then promptly shown the door not long after. This is a cycle I had observed NUMEROUS times. Partners are also incredibly inefficient at critical feedback and creating a growth path for employees: you feel like they are more so criticizing you and blaming you for feeling a certain way (almost implying that, if everyone else is able to work, there's something wrong with you which is untrue as this feeling of stress is company wide) rather than giving you constructive feedback and creating a plan to make both the partners and employees happy. This has also led to another familiar cycle at Barrel: people quitting in waves in order to find new opportunities.
Finally, present and future clients BEWARE. The partners have a tendency to mock clients behind their backs, whether it is for the idea of their company, complaints about client demeanors or the personalities of members on the client team. None of the comments are overly malicious, but if i were a client, I would not appreciate the thought of my agency rolling their eyes at some of my ideas/suggestions/expectations and would rather they talk about it more professionally internally.
