Being busy =/= being productive - Anonymous employee Edelman Employee Review

Though it pays lip service to work-life balance and professional development for junior staff, Edelman is mediocre to poor in both respects. Task, staff and client management are unfortunately lacking. Little effort is put into pushing back against overly demanding and unreasonable clients, which translates into long hours and being blindsided by quick-turnaround projects. Essential office functions like payroll, billing and IT are in a sorry state, creating unnecessary time sucks that get in the way of actual work. Most of Edelman's work isn't particularly sophisticated, and there's little effort put into building junior staff's expertise with client industries or with the tools of the trade it does use. Staff are in general overloaded and much of their time isn't so much spent on client tasks as it is grappling with unclear expectations, too many competing priorities and a low signal-to-noise ratio in office communications. The company tries to spin its flat structure as an opportunity/favor to its employees, but the real consequence of that is that time and effort get diverted away from doing client work to talking about it. Most frustrating of all is how Edelman responds to concerns by finding new ways to hype its brand to its employees while doing nothing to change the internal processes that get in the way of their productivity.