School Specialty Reviews

Pros

Great employees, some have been with the company for years. Casual dress, hard workers.
Fair pay rate - falls within averages.
"Promise Hours" - Paid time off for getting involved with school activities (your child's or not)
Working in the education industry - feeling of making a difference.
Flexibility in schedule. College reimbursement.

Cons

Financially the company has gone through rough times. For the past 4 years there have been no pay raises, no bonuses, and company wide furloughs (2-3 per year) and the past 2 years 1 week company shut down. No 401K matches, health insurance benefits always changing and going from bad to worse. Mandatory health assessments and 'grade' determines your portion of coverage. Past 4 years there have been 3 rounds of lay-offs, on and off again hiring freezes.
Constant change of direction in company, bad communication with employees. Constantly being told that people come first yet employees are the first to suffer when financial times are hard.

Advice to Senior Management

Listen to what your employees are saying. Many frustrations due to having issues in working environment, with other employees, processes, etc. fall on deaf ears and no action is ever taken.
Find solutions that show you truly value the employees you do have. Invest in training & internal advancement.

Pros

Nice people
Comfortable facility
Executives have an open-door policy that they take seriously.

Cons

Minimal opportunity for advancement
Inadequate training
Company is in financial turmoil. Pay has been frozen for 3-4 years and six weeks of unpaid furlough have been required over the past two years. Many layoffs have resulted in severe under-staffing, to the point where people are unable to do quality work
Failure to prioritize projects and to keep them proportional to available resources.

Advice to Senior Management

Solicit information from people at all levels -- what they know could have helped you avoid some very costly mistakes.
Govern!

Pros

Premier division allows you flexibility in work s Hedy.e for sales, product helps students and many kind people that want to help. New president at Premier could improve things

Cons

Furloughs, pay cuts, lack of needed materials, poor leadership at the Premier site, promotions given to people that aren't qualified, some leaders like VP of sales have never lead anything that has been successful and he is trying to lead the sales force......many regional managers overpaid for what they do and are just hoping they are not the next one eliminated so they are no more than yes people.

Advice to Senior Management

Listen to the field not the leaders as they are only interested in telling you what you want to hear. The basic sales structure will not work with today's market. Until sales and office people trust you nothing will change. The current team of leaders minus the new president are not trusted by those they lead and nothing most of them can do will regain the trust.....too many broken promises. Noone trust the leader of sales ...he is I way over his head.

Pros

Good people at Director levels and below
Flexible time off options
Casual, I mean casual, not even business casual, dress code
In the business of helping to Educate the future, when you get away from all the other junk, it really could be a good thing

Cons

Executives are disengaged and out of touch with what is really going on around and inside of the business
VPs are incompetent and unexperienced in their roles and provide little to no productive direction to their business units
Financial stability of the organization continues to decline with most recent stock prices hovering around $3.00 compared to the mid 40's of 5 years ago
Education market is tough right now, but School Specialty has done a lot of damage themselves...bad leadership making bad decisions leads to even worse financial results

Advice to Senior Management

Get in the game and make sure your chose front-line has a clue and is held accountable. The little folks can only work so hard and do so much without your help.

Pros

Nice people to work with. Like working with schools. Customers know who School Specialty is.

Cons

The comp plan is terrible. Bonus plan that is all or nothing and is paid out once a year

Advice to Senior Management

Sales people need goals that are obtainable and need incentives to sale.

Pros

Good at providing on going training and there are some advancement

Cons

Furloughs, lack of raises, no 401k match...

Pros

Local employees banded together at the site to counsel each other since the economy forced them to stay at the job.

Cons

Benefits stripped. Holding your breath at every quarter to see who is laid off this time. Management pretending everything is alright, they are only interested in the stockholders. HR treating educated people like children.

Advice to Senior Management

Too late for this company, there is not much left for bankruptcy. Sell the profitable pieces and let people out of their misery.

Pros

The people in my immediate area are helpful.

Cons

Lack of financial leadership. Company is grossly overextended. Just let an additional 68 full time people go, 23 in Customer Care. Lack of knowledge is terrible. Helping anyone? What a joke. The database, Oracle, is cumbersome at best. Finding someone to help with finding information on Oracle is a joke. No one wants to help you succeed, especially managers. Just told to "look on Schoolyad", the inhouse website.

Advice to Senior Management

Get back to basics. School Smart brands are horrible. Quality at Caliphone, Artco-Bell are also terrible. SO much money is given back as credits, or No Charge Returns. Terrible money management. Need better leadership at all levels!

Pros

I love the work and my co-workers. It is a shame that such good people, who work hard to provide the best customer experience are treated so poorly. The employees have no support and no incentive to do well.

Cons

Salaries have been decreased through furloughs and significant salary reductions for the past few years. No 401K match the past three years.
The management's focus is to satisfy the investors. Too many levels of upper management.
There is no opportunities for upward mobility or incentives for going beyond the scope of the work function.
When sales goal is met one year, unobtainable goal is given following years, even though the "desireable" compensation package is 70% base salary and 30% bonus/commission. You only receive merit pay increase if you meet sales goal. Of course, raises have not been given in three years.
Very little training and support to do the job.
Outside sales is requires to have a vehicle that meets minimum requirements set by the company, but SSI only pays 71.4% of the vehicle expenses.

Advice to Senior Management

Educate yourself on the education market...the difference between commodities and curriculum selling. Apply reductions in divisions not making money, not across the board.

Pros

Being in the education market is a plus. Good co-workers, decent managers.

Cons

Poor biz decisions--running biz into ground. Doesn't empower workers to succeed. Treats professionals like children. Forced pay cuts and furloughs.

Advice to Senior Management

Treat people as your most important asset. Don't run a publishing company like a commodities biz.