Cadient Group Reviews

Pros

great work life balance and friendly smart people

Cons

lack of resources available on staff

Advice to Senior Management

sell to a larger company

Pros

almost want to put not applicable! but i will say, most of my co-workers were cool. a lot of the people who left were great, now it seems like everyone is trying to leave.

Cons

management decisions, layoffs, strategic vision is hardly believable. employee morale is low. the exciting new offices are rather lame.

Advice to Senior Management

be honest with your employees. they don't believe what you're saying.

Pros

it is a place to work, and they do pay you. You can pretty much get away with anything because no one pays attention to you unless you're senior management.

Cons

The retards are running the zoo. Promotions to people who don't deserve it. They are trying to sell stuff to clients that didn't work in the 90s. Creativity is squashed in favor of strategy, and making the client happy.

Advice to Senior Management

Replace the CEO, start trusting the employees you hired.

Pros

Coworkers are generally very bright and fun to work with. The work is challenging and interesting, and it involves cutting-edge Web technology. The benefits package is better than adequate.

Cons

Relentless expectation (often demands) for long hours of overtime well into the night and over weekends -- including explicit instruction to cancel any personal plans -- without any additional compensation or even any possibility for comp time, coupled with hours docked from you paycheck if you sleep in and show up late in the morning. (I have seen people not only docked but actually repremanded for sleeping in and showing up at 11 a.m. after being required to work without extra pay till 2 a.m. the night before.) Lots of last-minute work done way too fast to allow for quality control, and the result is a lot of sloppy work and lost accounts. Virtually no communication from the top about important management decisions; when I was there it was impossible to get an organizational chart, and the various work groups had abstract names that had no functional meaning.

Advice to Senior Management

Institute montly skip-level meetings for ALL employees, and take the feedback seriously. Stop thinking that the employees are driven to perform only for the sake of company profits, unless you can really guarantee that everyone gets a share of profit. You need to give other good motivation for people to care. FInally, stop docking time off if you won't pay overtime. You need to institute a comp time policy asap or else don't be surprised if employees get together on a class action suit to recoup their hundreds of hours of uncompensated labor.

Pros

The ability to reach across departments and understand all steps and processes of an agency was helpful. It was great to see how everything worked together.

Cons

ideas from management seemed to be made in a vaccuum. There was little or no input from the employees who are meant to make it happen.

Advice to Senior Management

Listen to your employees and care about what they are doing. Supervision of employees seems to be lacking and many are left to make it on their own.

Pros

Super smart head of strategy who has a great feel for what clients want
Good stepping stone to get into other big time agencies that have full service capabilities
Great benefits package for a small company
Decent case studies

Cons

Weak delivery and singular focus on the financials make for dissatisified customers.
Project management team is weak and is not customer centric. They make poor customer facing decisions.
They have lost most of their customers in the last 2 years and are in a rebuilding mode.
With the lost customers comes lost staff. There have been major layoffs and defections. The non-compete forces people to stay because they sue most who leave. They even threaten people who have been laid off.

Advice to Senior Management

Threating to sue your staff if they leave isn't a good retention strategy. Find out why people are looking to leave and fix it.

Pros

Co-workers are talented and conscientious individuals. Satisfying client needs are high on employees agenda. Great place to start out a career.

Cons

Senior management looks for increased revenue while wearing down employee morale. No respect for the employees. I'd love to give my all to help the company succeed, but the lack of recognition and respect sucks you dry.

Advice to Senior Management

Retool the management team with new blood. The management team is completely unaware of the mood of the floor.

Pros

Strategic for the healthcare industry--good strategic leadership. Allows employees to manage their own personal schedules. Respects the biz dev process. Good research team

Cons

Not necessarily client-focused. Unimpressive creative. Allows too much flexibility of team members. Too much emphasis on internal needs rather than client growth needs

Advice to Senior Management

Continue focusing on ideas and new business, but allow for greater emphasis and flexibility on inline growth rather than internal processes

Pros

Good, smart people, good intentions, good medical benefits, collaborative environment. Upper management has a very open-door policy and are always accessible

Cons

Pay seems slightly less than comparable positions elsewhere, serious resource challenges of late, creativity is inconsistent, knowledge share is hard to come by unless you are super proactive to learn

Advice to Senior Management

Greater stress on creative strength and innovation; improve knowledge share within agency and better position Cadient as a Thought leader in the industry through corporate blogging, Facebook, etc.

Pros

I work with some of the best people I've ever met. I can honestly say that I've made true friends here.

Cons

I don't agree with everything that's been posted here. Our CEO is not a glorified PM, but he is a hell of a salesman (the best I've ever met). With that said, there's a big difference between being a salesman and a CEO. His recent trend of going on every little pitch and presentation that comes along suggests we are desperate. And any potential client would pick up on that. It's dangerous to establish the company's CEO as being too accessible.

Beyond that, Cadient is clearly headed into purely consulting territory. There is very little value placed on creativity. The company does nothing to foster creative productivity or quality. Instead, it settles on mediocre product that pales in comparison to its own work just 2 years ago.

PMs have not been properly trained. Designers are treated like children and consequently act like children.

Advice to Senior Management

Cadient's senior management is nothing short of passive aggressive. They send out email reminders of company policy instead of speaking to the one or two employees who need to be spoken with. Management does NOTHING to enforce process, which is directly responsible for projects going overbudget (and it happens consistently). Nobody here is interested an being the authority figure.

Blank walls, tan carpet and cubicles are not inspiring anybody. 2 years without raises or bonuses, and essentially taking a pay-cut to pay our new health insurance provider for similar coverage that we had prior to switching is not incentive for anyone to stay.

PERCEPTION IS REALITY. If it looks like Cadient doesn't care about it's employees, it might as well not. I believe management actually does care. They can't afford not to. But they need to be more conscious of the decisions they're making.