Shaw Communications Reviews in Edmonton, AB Area

Pros

Awesome benefits. There is not really any other Pro at this time.

Cons

Micromanaged, no recognition, does not care for quality, but quantity, emphasis on sales even when you are not in a sales environment

Advice to Senior Management

Get back to basics, listen to your customers, give them a product they want with service they want. Don't say one thing and do another towards your employees.

Pros

Nice People To Work With
Fair Compensation

Cons

Micro-Managed
If you don't suck up to management then be prepared to be treated poorly
Very demanding

Advice to Senior Management

A little more effort in training and treating people better can go a long way towards motivating people

Pros

Best reasons to work for Shaw is inexpensive TV, pep-rallies, benefits, free fruits in the morning (if you work evening too bad for you). They are excellent in inspiring you on how great of a company Shaw is to work for; they are experts in building your hope with false promises; they are really good in keep you up to date with company developments after everyone else in the world knows about it; they have really good values, such as loyalty, accountability, team-player (ofcourse these values are to be shown by the employees not necessarily the employer back to you).

Cons

Pep-rallies. They are excellent in inspiring you on how great of a company Shaw is to work for; they are experts in building your hope with false promises; they are really good in keep you up to date with company developments after everyone else in the world knows about it; they have really good values, such as loyalty, accountability, team-player (ofcourse these values are to be shown by the employees not necessarily the employer back to you).

Schedule. You are expected to work alternate weekends, mornings, afternoon, evenings; the schedule is constantly changing week to week (there is no consistency in it) and although one of the company values is balance, don't expect yourself to have any work-home balance.

Supervisor. Supervisors are usually as uninformed as you are. There real job is to baby sit. It is not unnatural for them to sneak up behind you to look at your screen, or what you are doing on your cell phone (even if it is your break-time), and all of them with exception of 1 or 2 are actually educated or trained in leadership or management. Although they feel that they are professionals, there approach can be very rude at time; for example, they could come to you and say, "we need to have a meeting with you for spreading negativity on the floor," while your co-workers are there listening to that; or if there is any issue with the system, they could essentially blame you without thinking that it is a system error. If I could summarize that in one word: immaturity.

Job/performance. Consistency is defined to be excellent on all call no matter what. You could have done excellent 5 calls, but the sixth call you might have not because of the attitude of the customer, so you are not considered excellent at your job. You are held accountable for washroom breaks, you are held accountable for going over your coffee/lunch break time even by 30 seconds, you are held accountable for your attitude. Example can include, if you take a washroom break or to grab some water, you can be told why dont you do that on your coffee break or before your shift starts; if you go over your time while on a 30 minute lunch break, someone can come looking for you; if you have really good stats in your performance, you could still be a bad performance because of your "attitude" or "how-behavior".

There are alot of qualified people working as technical support reps. Some have masters in comp sci, some were mechanical engineers, and some may have been supervisors in their previous roles. Most of them expect the roles with the hopes and promise of moving up in the company and going into a department that is related to their field. Their potential is usually undermined by those who are able to build relationship and become friends with the write people even though their experience may not be relevant. We have seen numerous unqualified people moved into positions, and people with potential (and those who should be kept at the company) are irritated by weak excuses of poor performance or bring up some irrelevant statistic to be even be considered for a position.

Advice to Senior Management

Management found a perfect way to escape from responding to good ideas. They created a blog called My Voice and said, if you post it on there, the right person will hear you and you will get a quicker response. So now when it comes to giving feedback, there is absolutely no accountability to it.

Furthermore, Values of a company is not what an employee should represent, but what a company should represent, trickling down from the top. And once that noble example is set, then it can be emulated. You can't claim to have the value of loyalty, and then lay off those who have been with the company for over 35 years. To you it is a strategic decision, to us its reneging on the philosophy of being people-powered.

Pros

well-known, high profile company. reduced prices on telecomm services.

Cons

Weasel managers. Sterile noisy environment. Incompetent product & schedule planning. Lack of cooperation between staff members. low salaries compared to many other high-tech companies.

Advice to Senior Management

quarterly pep rallies exhibit shallowness of vision.

Pros

Decent pay grids, low cost cable TV for your home. Large enough company to have positions to move into. Company looks to internal candidates for opening first. Reasonable training.

Cons

Rare that you get a week were you actually have 2 days off in a row. Company sees themselves as a vital service and therefore operates 24/7, 365 days a year. This means employees have trouble finding time off. Some areas have huge inefficiencies and management doesn't seem to listen to possible solutions. Too many make work projects.

Advice to Senior Management

Scale back the number of hours and days that service is provided. Installs don't need to happen on Sundays or holidays (especially Christmas). Watch out for duplication of work. Too many paper trails and not a good enough computer program to handle the necessary hand off of bookings to installs to accounting, etc.