Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Reviews

Pros

Authors and books to be proud of; talented staff; collegial atmosphere.

Cons

Rickety IT, sometimes bureaucratic HR

Advice to Senior Management

Need long-term strategy, after several years of short-term buffeting

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

HMH is a company that is well respected in the industry. Customers respect the name for quality materials.

Cons

The company became too large. The merging of Houghton and Harcourt resulted in poor decisions regarding who was kept in place and who was let go. Many of the decisions were purely political and some of the best people were ousted from the company.

Advice to Senior Management

The company needs to direct itself into e-learning in a more aggressive way if it is to compete with the new, innovative, and emerging ed tech companies that will dominate the market place.

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

Benefits and the bad economy are the only factors keeping most of the employees with this company. Everyone is afraid to leave, there are scary reports from outside the company so people are staying where they are.

Cons

There are some good people in the company, but others are just holding on to the benefits and the accrued vacation time. Once you have been with the company for 15 years, you have 4 weeks of vacation every year and that is hard to give up, even if you have. They may have known something several years ago, but now they are just holding on to a world that has changed.

Advice to Senior Management

The company should go position-by-position to find the people who do not belong and remove them. This could be the end of this company if this problem is not handled soon.

Pros

Benefits, Vacation time, Personal time. Don't have to punch a clock and it is nice not being micro managed. Managers trust employees to get the work done on time. Employees are hard working, care about quality and put a lot blood, sweat and tears into their work.

Cons

Company doesn't have a clue on how much their employees bail them out of projects. Company does respect employees in terms of loyalty, work ethic, or salary. Tired of being treated as a number with only the bottom line as a deciding factor.

Advice to Senior Management

Everyone from low level employee to senior management is in the same boat. It is the executive management that needs to take a step back and realize the only reason this company is successful is because of its employees. Try rewarding the employees and you might see a better work atmosphere.

Pros

Great work/life balance. Plenty of time off, 12 holidays off a year, 60+ hours occasional absence days, 2 weeks of vacation per year.

Cons

job cuts make your future uncertain. No one is safe. Little Rock Operations center just closed its doors.

Advice to Senior Management

Restructuring won't save your company.

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

Flexible hours and very hard-working employees who care about the products.

Cons

 If you hang around long enough, they will lay you off.  Older, experienced workers, watch out!
Short-term financial goals and arrogance are the hallmarks of the current (top heavy) upper management.  
Communication is abysmal, and senior management rules by fear--it doesn't inspire loyalty or confidence.  The fact that they still have good quality products is due to the dedicated, under-recognized workforce.  Hats off especially to the Dublin tech office.

Advice to Senior Management

Rather than downsizing more of the folks who actually do the work, senior management should resign in shame for what they have done to this company.

Pros

The people are so talented and dedicated. You couldn't have asked for more supportive colleagues in the business!

Cons

• There is no job security and certainly no payoff for all of the hours spent working.
• Communication is pointless among different departments, because HMH does not bother with spending time with its talented employees to learn what actually happens on the operations-level. Decisions are made based on what senior management believes, yet the opposite is true.
• Senior management also should desist with the relentless shallow features (such as the flatscreen TVs installed on every floor) that were brought forth to raise communication but more importantly to show outsiders that HMH was doing well financially. Those TVs could have saved a job!
• Senior management should also desist with the incredibly frustrating online tools to measure performance, such as SAP and PMP. Both are ridiculously tedious, not user-friendly, and who even bothers to read those PMPs? No one earns raises, and certainly no one gets promoted! What is the point of doing PMPs if you cannot even write the truth? If I truly believed that I went above and beyond the 4 or 5 star rating, why shouldn't I write that on my PMP? It's because of the ludicrous rule that if you write that on your PMP, HR records that as a raise, and far be it from HMH to actually reward a stellar employee with a raise! The whole idea of time-punching is pointless as well. Note to management: how would you like it if someone told you to record your time? How would you like to record how many pages you reviewed within a certain hour, how many meetings you participated in, how many useless hours it took you to even locate someone with the correct information? It takes that long to record all of that information when you could have actually been DOING work!

Advice to Senior Management

Senior management needs to thank the employees still working at HMH, because these are dedicated people who will come to work early, stay late, miss vacations, postpone events, etc. just to complete deadlines (which are usually insanely tight).