-Severely lacking frontline officers and esprit de corps. Teams simply do not coordinate on objectives or even bother to share job descriptions between each other. I repeatedly asked to sit on sales calls to better understand their processes, allowing me to more effectively support them, but was looked over when this actually came to fruition. The hospitality manager spent more time in secret meetings than managing our team in any conceivable way. The open office setup is largely pointless.
-Never personally met the majority of senior personnel despite sitting ~10 yards from Jeff Kaplan, the COO. Asymmetric office cultures as you will be taking phone calls from angry chefs while the marketing and design teams are on the roof drinking rose. Certain teams leave on-time, every day, while others culturally and operationally require you to work overtime. You will likely get yelled at by someone you never met for doing something you had no idea was problematic.
-Unacceptable lack of transparency in the interview process - for instance, they understandably ask for a reasonably flexible schedule but did not brief me or my counterpart new hires on taking phone calls at 0330 from 18 year-old Australian hosts calling the emergency number because their WiFi is down for three minutes.
-Hilariously inefficient training. Completely onboarding a hospitality manager, even if they have basic experience with Salesforce and have an industry background, is roughly six months, about the same time it takes to become a Navy SEAL. However, due to the changing nature of the product, when you are green-lit to go-live, much of what you have learned and mentally reinforced is not applicable to day-to-day operations. I would have honestly preferred going live on day one and learning on the fly rather than spend the better part of half a year training only to start taking cases completely unconfident in my abilities.
-Due to the nature of training, it is devastating to lose personnel, but seemingly not treated as such.
-Unlimited work. So many clients were being onboarded every month that our mission to provide boutique customer support became virtually impossible. Our support ticket queue would rarely have less than twenty outstanding tasks, each of which could vary from five minutes of support to multiple days. The metrics for recording the work associated with each employee was opaque at best.
-Dueling narratives with regards to employee satisfaction. Our team had meeting after meeting in which we tried to make our jobs more efficient, less stressful, delineate objectives, voice questions and concerns, and we tried to personally tailor schedules. At the end of the day, however, it became abundantly clear that management would rather find people to acquiesce to the position rather than make it work for us, despite the months and months of training and having only been “live” for a matter of weeks. Growth outpaces grasp.
-Ultimately, better opportunities abound. Tock hires extraordinary people and then expects an awful lot from them in a fairly hostile and cold environment. I could honestly write much, much more as I have since moved on and have had time to reflect. Nevertheless, my experience there is still something of an open wound.
