Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Reviews in Boston, MA Area

Pros

They have a pretty good work/life balance. Working from home is pretty normal and fairly well supported. The people are genuinely supportive and friendly. There's some residual sense of what publishing used to be like.

Cons

The company finances are under serious pressure from huge debt service and declining sales and that gets reflected in ever increasing budget cuts and a continuous potential for layoffs. Large parts of the work are outsourced. They've cut past the bone into the marrow of the business. The HR Dept and the Performance Management Program has become a parody of Human Resources.

Advice to Senior Management

Licensing the legacy product won't get the company back to the black. The treatment of your employees is alienating your best assets, but maybe that's the plan. To shrink to a virtual company won't save it. Develop a bold vision of the future of education and trade publishing from the cubicle level and go down with guns blazing. Unfortunately, the bean counters in charge probably won't allow that.

Pros

Skilled And talented marketing department that can move a high volume of projects using limited resources. Impressive marketing team mates who collaborated and helped each other to move project forward. If you thrive on high paced environment with intense deadlines that challenges your skill level look no further.

Cons

Project kickoff meeting were vague and dissorganized lacking any scope or vision. SAP ordering system is difficult and challenging to process high volume of purchase orders. Upper managent gave minimal support shrugging their shoulders passing on confusion as status quo in the educational print industry. Very little training and limited on boarding process on SAP.

Advice to Senior Management

Hire additional employees based on volume of work and remove controlled caios as a leadership style.

Pros

Casual dress code. Very talented editors and designers left over from the time when Houghton was actually a publishing company. Ten personal days in addition to at least two weeks vacation each year and ten paid holidays.

Cons

Editorial and production schedules are too tight and force workers to work unpaid overtime without so much as a thank you. The measly raises do not even cover the rise in the cost of living. My department suffered from constant hemorrhaging of talent for these reasons.
The corporation has two time tracking systems, let's call them MeTime and PASS. If one happens to eat lunch, first one uses MeTime to enter one's lunch hour and also the time that is spent entering that time in PASS. Then one uses PASS to enter one's lunch hour and also the time one spent entering one's lunch hour in MeTime. Yes, it is that insane. I asked HR and IT if the data could somehow be imported from one application to the other automatically. I was told that this had been looked into and was deemed not feasible.
The corporation also has a "talent alienation" (or perhaps "time wasting") system. One is forced to make endless reports on one's progress in a very unwieldy application. This usually takes about 12-16 hours each time. The system presents one with goals like "Employee thinks outside the box" and "Employee creates synergy" and one has to spit back these buzz words in little essays about how one is "growing the company" and "growing one's talents". I am a fluent writer so I can play this game easily, even though it prevents me from doing real work. However, what do people who are not as verbal do? And who reads these reports in any case? Everyone suspects that their sole purpose is to justify layoffs. I myself suspect that system itself was the initiative of some member of the upper management to show that he was actually doing something between his afternoon latte and his afterwork appletini. Perhaps he or she was laid off in the last round of layoffs, so this situation will improve when they realize the system eating deeply into worker productivity and is costing the company a lot of money.
How many times did I see management walk past my office leaving early while I slaved away to meet their unreasonable deadlines? The management has been very slow in the last decade in its response to the rise of the Internet. They failed to ask what the nature and the place of the book would be in the digital age. As a result, they let many opportunities slip away and bankrupted the company. Instead of leaving early, they should have been working to create digital initiatives.
Around 2004-2007, I heard many young talented junior editors made wonderful suggestions about digital initiatives in meetings. They were fobbed off by the management who did not want to stay late and write the memos and make the plans--they couldn't work late like the workers they managed. Then the same managers rushed into my office in a panic in 2009 asking how we could implement exactly what these junior editors had suggested years ago. They could not ask those editors, who had long ago left for other companies that were more rewarding personally and financially. But it is too little, too late. That boat has sailed.
The publisher for my division was so out of touch that that s/he never noticed that his/her schedules could not be met until his/her department was in absolute crisis. Then before relenting and adjusting the schedules, s/he would throw a tantrum saying that we didn't understand publishing. I understood that s/he owned a place int the country and took lovely vacations all the time, while I couldn't even afford to save for retirement and lived in miserable studio apartment.
The company is also having legal troubles because of past underreporting of press runs and lack of payment of royalties to artists and photographers, and this creates an atmosphere of desperation and fear in the production departments. Truly a toxic work environment, even if the term "toxic" is overused nowadays.

Advice to Senior Management

Did you here the story of the farmer who almost trained his donkey to work with no food? Every day he fed it less and less, and just when he thought he had finally trained the donkey to work with no food at all, it up and died on him!
The company has been jerry-rigged as a machine for transferring federal education dollars to investors' coffers. It will not survive in this capacity as federal budgets tighten and should reconsider its position. Recent problems with spelling errors in iPad apps due to lack of proofreaders for the apps (all laid off probably...) show that there is only so much restructuring one can do before the brand is harmed. Press runs go badly because of supply problems created by Williams Lea. Talented freelancers look elsewhere because of the cumbersome HMH contracting apparatus.
Start running the company like a publishing firm, although that may be difficult, since the company is owned by bankers, not people with experience in the publishing industry. The company seems to be run by people with no great love for books. The brand will suffer if no action is taken, and that is all HMH has got.
There is absolutely no synergy between the various divisions. School does not work with Children's Trade, Education and College (when it existed) do not work with Reference, and the management discourages any sort of "synergy." They have got to forego their 4 o'clock appletini at Tico's downstairs and try to think up some lucrative plans in their office.
Get rid of PMP. It must be losing the company money, because so much worker time is eaten up by filling up all the little boxes with buzzwords.

Pros

It's a paycheck and there are some good people that work there. Most of the good talent has moved on to bigger and better things.

Cons

Senior Leadership is a mess, they get paid too much, always get bonuses, and generally have no clue whats going on around them.

There are too many managers.

Too much talk and no actions.

Morale is at an all time low.

Advice to Senior Management

The company needs to be gutted and rebuilt from the ground up. Get rid of all of the meaningless out of date processes (I have to track my time three different ways every week.) Do it right or shut it down.

Pros

Excellent people at the middle management level; high degree of professionalism in the product development areas.

Cons

Less than competitive compensation; poor HR interface; lack of leadership at the executive levels of the company.

Advice to Senior Management

Reward the employee base with competitive salaries and benefits; eliminate waste and inefficiency especially in the operations areas; better communication of core values and corporate initiatives; commit to a publishing program based on quality and service.

Pros

Since they have been laying off all my lovely coworkers, there are few.
Casual dress code? But since the salaries are so low, they could hardly require workers to dress well.

Cons

Schedules are set by project managers who have never done the job of those they manage, and don't even understand the job, so they cannot comprehend why everyone is so rushed and is so overworked. To get the schedules done, one has to work weekends and evenings and the management never acknowledges this.
Very poor vertical and lateral communication. Everyone has their little fiefdom that they guard jealously.
Insane time-tracking down to the minute through two different time systems that are not compatible.
Upper management does not seem to track industry trends, resulting in products that seem outdated and out of touch with today's web-based book consumption and education.

Advice to Senior Management

Management should realise that morale is low because employees are overworked and underpaid and the schedules forced on them are unreasonable. High employee turnover, problems with press runs, excessive and expensive changes to copy and covers at late dates are ultimately the result of poor management, not worker carelessness.

Pros

Great people, authors, and a great name in publishing.

Cons

Management struggling not because of their style but more so due to the nature the business is headed.

Pros

Flexibility, good work / life balance,

Cons

poor benefits, no raises, low pay and stinky commission plan

Advice to Senior Management

Everyone is trying to cover their own ass instead of being open and honest with one another. And non of the reps have a clue as to what's going on..oh yeah, and new management has even less of a clue.

Pros

The company is mature and stable (which is also its challenge). The culture is generally quite collegial. Location is great and the opportunities interesting because the industry is in such a state of change.

Cons

Poor communication: up, down and lateral
Major changes required: are they too inert to adapt?

Advice to Senior Management

Outsource the innovation process: it's very difficult at this or any other large company to think creatively and constructively outside the box. Spawn 1-3 design/development skunk works organizations, as independent but connected subsidiaries.
Listen more to the market and to customers!

Pros

Great co-workers (who are slowly leaving for better companies/salaries/benefits).
The pay check. It might not be great, or even up to regional market statistics, but it's money.

Cons

Senior Level Management (Directors and above) have no concept of how their actions affect people in their departments.
Dis-respect shown to employees by Sr. Management.
Lack of empowerment with employees. We are not able to make decisions, everything needs to go through Sr. Management for approval.
Lack of communication from Sr. Management down to the bottom.
Too many levels of management.

Advice to Senior Management

If you are going to send out surveys, read the results. Make actual and effective changes using those results. We don't want your promises of how things are going to get better, they have never gotten better.
Be pro-active and not reactive.
Treat employees with respect - tell us why you're doing what you're doing.
Create a PMP system that lets us (the lowly, working emplyees) rate Sr. Management and let the results of those affect your raises and bonuses.
Let us do our jobs, that's what you're paying us for. If we aren't doing them well, deal with that using the "new" Performance Management System - that's what it's for.
Let people telecommute. It improves performance and job satisfaction as well as saves the environment and the company's money.
Become a "forward-thinking company" instead of talking about becoming forward-thinking.
Value the knowledge that you have with the employees that are still here.
Pay everyone according to up-to-date market statistics.