If you can understand and adapt to the culture, the pay/benefits are tough to beat! - Administrative Assistant Community Transit Employee Review

Four very different classes of employees: (1) Management, who are in on what's going on and pride themselves on keeping everything secret. As such, morale amongst them and view of the agency tends to be excellent. In some departments, the title is given to establish credibility with external audiences. Mostly hired externally, they usually have zero training in management or leadership, and there's no expectation to get any, so they don't. What they do do is grab visible opportunities to advance their own careers, with the non-visible scraps left to their staff, who they only check in on once in a while via seemingly-required 1-on-1 meetings and once/year by rote "performance" reviews. I saw no "managers" with any interest in developing their staff, but I knew a couple who saw (one even saying that) staff as essentially merely pawns to do their bidding and treated them as such. (2) Staff who follow, like a cult. There is an unprecedented level of spin, with a significant percentage of public tax dollars spent on image, not only externally but internally as well. It works, for there are many bobble-heads on staff who blindly follow. However, for the scant few who have any interest, upward mobility is minimal, squelched by the preference to hire managers externally due to typecasting stuff as only capable of doing the same old, same old, and also by irregular and mis-matched development opportunities due to disinterest in and inattention by management. In other words, one can't even get the qualifications to advance, but even if you have some, you're not even thought of. Social activities and communications, e.g. Slack, are high priority, with, throughout the pandemic, management adamantly sticking to replacing private offices with open offices except for managers (some departments), further cementing the chasm between the two in their newest building in the expectation that collaboration amongst staff would follow. However, the culture is such that staff largely wait for their boss to direct them and to decide for them, resulting in disengagement and a variety of unproductive behavior. In that regard, work from home has been a boon for many, so much so that now management now has staff sign contracts agreeing to come into the office on certain days. (3) Staff who don't follow the cult. If they can maintain an extremely low profile, always agreeing with the boss, and shut up, they can survive what can be unhealthy situations long enough to qualify for a pension. If not, these folks are subject to bullying, ridicule, and a variety of exclusions that is tolerated by the agency. (4) Drivers. Though the past director successfully changed their culture to open up advancement opportunities for them, those who remain as drivers often complain of being routinely treated like a lower class by management, who wouldn't even install shields for their safety, both from the pandemic and from unruly passengers. Excuses are made as to why not rather than admitting it's a problem and here's what we can do. Drivers are held to strict standards reminiscent of a boot camp.