Asphyxiating Embarrassing Counterproductive Obstinate Mediocre - Anonymous employee AECOM Employee Review

Asphyxiating Employees are treated like they are six-year olds by corporate management. It doesn’t matter that you are a professional with 20 years experience, a graduate degree, and a solid reputation with clients – in their eyes you a now a little kid and will be treated as such. . Employees workspace needs to accomplish their job are an afterthought. Corporate management decided the most efficient workspace for everyone is a 7’x7’ “cube” with only two low walls in a noisy atmosphere featuring many visual distractions. It doesn’t matter that you need to speak on the phone with clients, require space to unfold engineering plots, must have project files on hand for reference, or usescientific instrumentation that requires a large footprint in your work area – according to management you have more than enough space. Embarrassing We may be in the midst of the Great Recession, but you’d never know it at AECOM as voluntary departures continue at a rapid pace. It makes for interesting conversations with clients as they wonder why yet another person working on their project left. Another embarrassing subject you end up discussing with your clients is your increased costs. AECOM management will tinker with your project by adding unexpected requirements to it. For example, they will require a risk analysis be done which the client did not ask for and does not want. You will be required to do this despite it not ever being budgeted for.. Instead, it will be up to you to convince the client that they have to pay for something additional. Counterproductive AECOM has a policy to promptly reward employees who go “above and beyond” in getting a project out. The employee is eligible to be awarded a $10 gift card, but only if the project they worked on is profitable (which is usually determined several months later). Also, it requires four managers to fill out paperwork and sign off on it, two of which are not in your office and don’t know anyone in your office. So to sum up, a small award that may not happen, if it does happen it will be many months later, and for it to happen all four people need to agree and take the time to fill out the paperwork (which is a non-billable activity). All for $10. To control printing costs, all copies need to be accounted for. When you go to make a copy, you have to fill out the billing number for the project and provide a comment on why the copy was needed. This gets interesting when you go to print a single page invoice on your project printing costs….. Obstinate *Policies that affect staff are developed by people who have no idea what you do, what the business need is, or what your clients needs are. The results are half-baked and not even close to being realistic. Attempts to educate the policymakers on how the policy causes issues with clients and how it doesn’t meet business needs are met with stonewalling. Typically one becomes aware of a new policy when a corporate official calls and chews you out for not following policy. They play the Gotcha! Game, where the employee is automatically at fault. It doesn’t matter that policy you had been following has been the same for several years and that no effort was made to alert the employees that the policies has changed, the employee is bad. Mediocre Corporate policies are poorly written, with many typos and grammar errors evident. Some policies include contradictory statements, leaving the reader puzzled over what to do. It makes one wonder if anyone ever reviewed them in the first place. Proactive attempts to find out how the policies apply in a specific situation are met with indifference, typically through Administrative Orbiting. Few outside your office know what you do or how good you are at it. The company bases most of compensation decisions on how billable an employee is. So as a result, people who are not good at what they do but work lots of billable hours get higher raises than employees who are effective. Equally disconcerting is the promotion process. Promotions are determined on a proportional basis between offices. You can hit all your goals, have clients enthralled, be incredibly billable, office management and staff love you, and it won’t matter, as due to the proportions between your office and the many other offices, there is no promotion slot. Given all the above, working at this company is not a good career choice. Whatever dreams and fulfillment that are sought are likely to be foiled by the bureaucracy and indifference. Should you depart the firm, be aware that AECOM management espouses the loyalty/traitor syndrome. Anyone who leaves is a traitor, and this will be loudly communicated to clients and other professionals. It doesn’t matter if the person left voluntarily, was laid off, or was fired, that person is now a traitor and should be publicly reviled. And god forbid that person go work for a competitor….