Pros
Clyde Group is an open and communicative workplace, and one that I feel fortunate to have been a part of. Employees are generally friendly, positive, helpful, and hard-working. The work is interesting and the opportunity to specialize in whatever aspects of the communications field you are most drawn to is very appealing. The agency is dedicated to continuing to grow and to expand both what it can do for clients and what it can offer employees. There are challenges, to be sure, and this is an industry that categorically is not for some people. But if you are looking for an opportunity to carve out a niche for yourself and willing to put in the time and effort to fill in the blanks where they might appear, you can definitely go far here and make yourself essential at a company with a bright future. • Opportunity – Clyde Group serves a diverse and fascinating roster of clients which provides a wide range of opportunities to grow your experience and work on interesting issues. The firm has built up significant experience in areas like healthcare, technology, education, and others, and is not shy about chasing potential opportunities in new areas. • Open lines of communication – It’s fairly easy to get facetime and communicate with anyone in the firm whenever you might need it, right up to the partners. • Flexibility – Clyde Group offers the ability to grow your career as a communications professional in almost any direction you can imagine, as long as you can make a case for what you want to do and how you can fill a particular role. You are rarely if ever locked into a particular situation, and can find opportunities to explore new specializations or skillsets often. • Compensation and career growth – I always felt well-compensated, and management is transparent about pay bands as well as the processes involved in earning raises, bonuses, and promotions. While nothing is guaranteed, it is easy to have clear and direct conversations with your direct supervisor (and with agency management where appropriate) about your compensation and what is needed to make it to the next level. • Benefits – Benefits are industry standard or better in many cases, and continued to improve during my tenure. Health insurance coverage in particular is a standout, with EXCELLENT premium contribution on the employer side. 401(k) match is competitive. PTO and sick leave policies are generous, starting off at several weeks annually and increasing as your years with the company grow. Leave policy for new parents is excellent as well.
Cons
Despite significant and sustained growth over the past few years, Clyde Group is still a small firm focused on building things from the ground up and growing its business, and that does come with its share of challenges. While its heart is usually in the right place, the firm can at time catastrophize over minor issues and invest significant time and resources in trying to fix them, while also ignoring deeper issues that merit attention. • Challenges with work-life balance – This is not unique to Clyde Group, and is more a function of both client service industries in general and the communications field in particular, but it bears mentioning regardless. Depending on client demands and the constant need to generate new business, there can be early morning work, after hours work, weekend work, and more. Efforts are made to address these challenges, but whatever success they might have, they tend to wither in the face of those overarching business pressures. • Inconsistency in addressing negative behavior – Management occasionally struggles to address employees who don't work well with others, particularly the more senior they are in the hierarchy. There's sometimes an "out of sight, out of mind" approach if an employee doesn't always behave with the professional and personal courtesies due to their coworkers, but are still "producing results" for the bottom line. The extent of this issue varies depending on the circumstances, but at its lowest points, it can result in talented employees leaving for greener pastures rather than putting up with the frustrations involved. • “Reinventing the wheel” syndrome – As a young firm, Clyde Group, and has gone through many iterations and reforms of its basic structure and processes for getting work done. This is not a bad thing in a vacuum, and when it yields a clear winner in terms of a process improvement or efficiency boost, that’s all well and good. Clyde Group is certainly a more robust and sophisticated organization than it was 3 or 4 years ago. But just as often, this impulse tends to be “change for the sake of change”, as though someone looked at a calendar and realized a management structure or process is in danger of reaching its one-year anniversary, and thus needs to be thrown out and replaced immediately. It’s not always clear that a real problem has been identified, or a compelling solution developed to fix it, only that things apparently needed to change. This can be disorienting and distracting the longer you have worked at the firm. • “HBR over real world experience” – management in general is good about trying to listen to employees and solicit their input and feedback on the firm’s growth and future, but there have been some struggles here as the firm has grown and evolved. Some changes or new initiatives at the firm seem to be inspired by whatever “pop management psychology” or “managing Millennials!” article is on the front page of the Harvard Business Review that week, rather than being tied directly to the circumstances and lived experience of the company itself.
