Versa Creative Reviews

Management shows a clear negligence in caring for their employees. Rather, there is a hierarchy that, if you are upset with, you get fired with little to no real explanation. Your vacation time gets docked even if you are just a minute late yet they expect you to consistently stay late and I even worked through lunches. No real company hand book was given out nor do they have a real HR department. Someone had to convince management that calling people out in an email that was sent to the entire office might be a bad idea, so management made someone send an email that if anyone wasn't up to par, they WOULD be called out in the future and everyone in the office would be cc'ed in the email. Management neglected to tell us about painting one day and the entire office had dizziness and headaches from 1 pm to end of business day. I raised a question via email about this and management's advice was basically "suck it up". A fellow employee also sent an email to the entire office including the two bosses in which he was clearly mocking and bullying me for complaining about the heavy paint smell. Nothing was done. The entire office got that email and nothing was done. I was terminated for "playing video games" because "several people said they had seen me." There was no real evidence nor was there anything installed on my computer. I repeatedly asked for work to do and was given none, so I invented work for myself on a regular basis. There's an extreme false sense of teamwork; I think it's Stockholm Syndrome or a variation of that.

What's most disturbing is that many punitive actions are enacted on employees without any clear explanation of HR policy. There is literally no HR, and no employee handbook or orientation to boot. Rules seem to simply be invented as needed, and then punishment is doled out through email, sometimes publicly. The variety of clients is a positive, as noted above. However, all clients are the lowest rung iteration of a business in their respective fields. Seems manageable enough, except try explaining 21st century strategy to an organization stuck in the 1980s. The same holds true of the agency itself. Their invented, inflexible policies seem straight out of the highly corporatized 80s. Much of the work can be performed remotely, yet one minute of tardiness in arriving to the brick and mortar location is a cardinal sin for which an employee is docked vacation time. Yes, you read that correctly; as corroborated by other reviews here, small amounts of tardiness (5 minutes, for instance) are recorded meticulously and subtracted from employees' vacation allotment. This in spite of the office's setting in the most traffic-laden part of Houston, home to some of the worst traffic congestion in the country. Did a pipe burst in your house this morning? Get stuck behind an accident on 610? Better reschedule that trip to visit your relatives over Christmas, since you'll be docked vacation time for having dealt with an emergency. But, of course, you wouldn't be taking that trip anyway because, during the holidays, in order to ramp up high volume sales for retail clients, salaried employees, who are already intensely underpaid, are required to stay hours late and work on the weekends with no extra compensation. While I worked here, I saw friends who worked elsewhere roll into their office casually at ~10:00 and, when they got their work done, no one cared. At Versa, if you don't arrive by 8:59 and leave any earlier than 6:01, you've signed a suicide note with regards to internal promotions or even basic respect from management. I have friends who work in successful ad agencies where workplace creativity and fun are prioritized. Here, following arbitrary orders is most important. It is, as another reviewer mentioned a fairly painless process to get hired at Versa. It's no wonder; if turnover is intensely high and there's a revolving door of hirings and firings, it makes sense to make the hiring process as easy as possible. You just have to ask yourself: do you want to work at a "creative" agency that's mired in traditional, obsolete business practices or would you rather take your talents, as so many of us have, somewhere else?