What a Disaster - Especially LA - Anonymous employee Verndale Employee Review

Thank you for taking the time to write this review. We appreciate all feedback both positive and negative and are happy to address some of your mentioned concerns. We do not consider ourselves a "Sitecore Shop" as mentioned in your review. Verndale is a balanced full service digital experience agency that has deep expertise in multiple platform technologies including but not limited to Sitecore. We are however, quite proud of our long term relationship with Sitecore and the work we've done with the platform. You mention dissatisfaction in our billable time requirements. All agencies must maintain billable time requirements. It's a function of the agency world. It is true that we ask our employees to work 8 hours a day. However, we do offer a very reasonable “flex-hours” and work-from-home policy that allows employees to take advantage of being out of the office when “life happens”. In addition to our flex-hours, our generous PTO policy allows employees to earn up to 200 hours of time off plus 9 additional paid holidays. Working in the agency world is not for everyone. It is a very fast paced environment and as a result some people are not successful in that situation; while others thrive in it. We're always sorry to hear when an employee is dissatisfied with a fellow employee or manager, as was the case in your review. Although we do wish that every employee worked flawlessly with one another, we know that this cannot always be the case. All companies have working relationships at a variety of satisfaction levels. It's important to us to do everything we can to improve any internal dissatisfaction between all employees. At Verndale we work towards this by holding recurring one on one meetings between employees and their managers; conducting 360 degree employee reviews; hosting quarterly professional management trainings on a variety of topics (some of which include emotional intelligence, accountability, coaching and presentation skills) and holding recurring one on one meetings between managers and the Executives. You've mentioned there is a lack of minority representation at Verndale. We understand the importance and value of having a diverse representation of cultures and backgrounds in our company. In our LA office alone 40% of the employees are non-white and 40% are female which is close to our global numbers of 41% non-white and 32% female. One of Verndales top values is respecting others. Our office environment is one where people of different backgrounds, cultures, sexualities and religions are working together. Your last concern was regarding two employees leaving the company shortly after being promoted. It's always hard to see a valued employee seek a different path. Anytime someone voluntarily leaves the company we take a long hard look at the reasons why to determine if different decisions could have resulted in a different outcome. Sometimes the answer is yes. But sometimes people leave for a career change, to leave the agency world, to work closer to home, or for numerous other reasons. On the flip side, we also have past employees return to Verndale. Two of our recent LA additions were employees who've worked for Verndale in the past and chose to return. As I mentioned earlier, we always appreciate candidate feedback and welcome constructive criticism. It is great to have this forum to respond to such concerns. We encourage anyone reading this review to take the time to look at our many other reviews to see a more balanced snapshot of the company's pros and cons. Sincerely, Megan Priest SVP, Human Resources Verndale