Sasaki Associates Employee Review

Current Employee – been working at Sasaki Associates

Pros – Good benefits, reasonable salary, some interesting project work, and a respectable level of commitment to quality work products and solid design.

There are some good, talented people who work here.

The multidisciplinary environment provides opportunities for better collaboration among the different disciplines.

Cons – Very poor, uninspiring leadership and mismanagement that lacks vision and big-picture thinking -- too many knee-jerk reactions and short-term solutions to problems that are systemic within the organization. A lot of micro-managers -- there needs to be a macro-visionary in the landscape architecture group.

The SF office plays a very secondary role to Watertown, which diminishes the opportunities for the SF office to work on world-class projects, and the environment is overly corporate for an office that is not very big.

Much of the design work, while competent, lacks imagination and innovation, and input from talented junior staff is too often disregarded.

A severe lack of transparency regarding business decisions made by the leadership.

Junior staff often get pigeon-holed very quickly into doing a certain type of work and certain kinds of tasks, which does not yield a solid foundation for professional development.

Multidisciplinary office lacks interdisciplinary collaboration and is more "silo-ed" than many single-discipline offices.

Advice to Senior Management – Management should nurture the talents of the existing staff and promote a meritocracy. Good work and efforts to show initiative often go unrecognized at Sasaki, which is demoralizing. While the company has laid off a number of people because of the economic circumstances, many others have left voluntarily because of such low morale. Management also needs to promote a more collaborative, interdisciplinary environment, and managers in the landscape architecture department need to push for more responsibility and leverage in design conversations by landscape architecture staff rather than relegate the landscape architect's role to providing assistance to the architects and planners.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend