Tuff Shed plays the game as if they are still a small family run business and on paper they may be "employee owned", but my factory did lay-offs the week before Christmas. I am not naive to the realities of a seasonal industry but treating employees as dispensable in that manner makes the "we are like family here" rhetoric feel dishonest. Catered lunches are nice but I have my own (actual) family at home to feed and I would have liked to have felt like my employer recognized that.
Poor pay relative to location and industry, at least at my position and immediately above. Tuff Shed uses common industry titles such as production manager and foreman but does not internally define them the same way as any other construction company. Expectations for job roles are unclear but there is no flexibility in pay to compensate. If I am expected to do major parts of the jobs both above and below my own, I expect to be compensated fairly regardless of the job title on paper. The role I was hired for has no clear purpose in the hierarchy at Tuff Shed, as admitted to me by senior leadership. The only metric I ever received professional feedback on from management was a KPI that was largely collaborative and dependent on cooperation from subcontractors that I had zero input on hiring, and many of whom repeatedly demonstrated themselves to be dishonest. I had all the accountability/responsibility for the work of my direct reports but no decision making abilities. I was deliberately excluded (by my GM) from participating in performance evaluations for my own workers and then did not receive one myself. I have no problem owning my own mistakes and shortcomings but being expected to own them from above and below was a source of constant frustration.
I watched sub-contractors repeatedly make critical errors (and was even expected to correct the errors on site) and behave rudely with customers with zero repercussions, yet watched actual Tuff Shed employees in fabrication get laid off because revenue was down. It seems likely that bad installation experiences would tie into sales, but Tuff Shed appears completely unable (unwilling?) to address this. You can and will be fired from Tuff Shed for factors you literally can not impact at your level.
