Tishman Speyer Reviews

Pros

-Cross functional opportunities
-Size
-Office space
-Quality of employees and management

Cons

-Hard to get promoted past a certain point

Pros

- Competitive Pay
- Summer Fridays
- Great HR staff from Sr. Director level and below
- Great Rockefeller Center work location
- Gym in building at Rock Center
- Restaurant and Top of the Rock Discounts

Cons

- Strange, elitist, family business driven culture
- Requirement to adhere to the way things are traditionally done even if ludicrous
- Anti-collaborative culture. Individual contributions are expected. You are on your own.
- Departments right next to each other don't speak!
- Poor formal career development programs
- ZERO communication from the top down on state of business

Advice to Senior Management

- Grow up and become a real small/mid size company
- Develop and coach employees properly, not in ad-hoc fashion
- Communicate more and break down siloed culture
- Benchmark with other companies that are doing it right. Just because business is mostly good, doesn't mean the culture cannot improve
- Hire a formal management consulting company to survey the environment and make recommendations on ways to improve moral

Pros

A small big global company.
Close-knit groups.
Summer Fridays.
If lucky, exposure to some good experience.

Cons

Treat all the employees like contractors. Once your work is done, they will not look for any other opportunities in the company but will be just kicked out next day.
No Career advancement opportunities

Advice to Senior Management

Treat employees right. Thats the only way to continue being successful.

Pros

Opportunities for professional growth and career advancement.
Provides training for specific tax and/or other accounting principles.
Great health, commuting and corporate benefits.

Cons

Management lacks interpersonal skills, which carries over to the rest of its employees.
Low morale.
With very tight, and sometimes unrealistic deadlines, it is often very difficult to balance work and a personal life.
Very little or no communication between management and subordinates.

Advice to Senior Management

Management should get some training on interpersonal skills. They indicate they have an open door policy, but really they don't.

Pros

Great brand name and industry recognition. Good experience to see several areas of the real estate lifecycle. Nice/smart people and global industry leader.

Cons

Generally speaking, while the work experience is good overall, the level of comp is below industry average and this has caused retention issues. Hard work is not always rewarded consistently across the company.

Pros

Brand Name Real Estate Firm that has portfolios on four continents. The Tax Structuring is interesting when you get the rare opportunity to participate.

Cons

Infrequent access to tax structuring. Much of the work is record keeping and little to do with Tax. The busy season lasts from January through December. Turnover is worse than the Big 4 firms creating difficulties in keeping up with the work. The compliance team is ignored creating more work. If you leave before 8p.m. this will count against your bonus.

Advice to Senior Management

Limit the role of tax to tax, increase the number of analysts and cut out the micro management of your employees and trust them with there work.

Pros

Company is well known and respected in real estate community. Has incredible geographic diversity of portfolio, potential for opportunities in other regions.

Cons

Pay is below market. Company leadership is a small group that favors the inner-circle and chosen people. For example, quick promotion of family members is really frustrating.

Advice to Senior Management

Stocking the office with extraordinarily expensive art doesn't make people feel better about being underpaid. HR department needs reworking. Head of HR sends chills down everyone's spines and is in general quite unpleasant.

Pros

Tishman Speyer is one of the leading Real Estate Companies in the world. They own some of the most prominent buildings in the world.

Cons

Tishman Speyer manages by fear and politics. They create a hostile work environment where only those that are "in" will succeed. The "in" group is usually not more hard working or qualified in fact usually it is the opposite.

Advice to Senior Management

Exit interviews might be a good idea for your company. Because you offer so little respect to some positions you are losing enormous amounts of money. It is a good thing your investors are not aware of this fact. Turnover does cost money and countless hours of inefficiency because a large amount of specific knowledge is lost because there is very little or no overlap between job positions. Not to mention being so de-motivated encourages those in the position to save money to overlook many projects because they are already overworked and disrespected. This ultimately does effect lease rates and therefore the investor(s).

Pros

You get to practice a lot of different Accounting principles with different Funds etc. You interact with a lot of different departments in order to have the financials done. Leasing and property management are key department to interact with. You also get to do Tax books. Cutting your teeth with this company will make your resume look great if you can bite your teeth and bear it for a few years.

Cons

The accounting department is headed by awful managers. Senior Directors for both the Fund side and property accounting side have managed to divide the departments between the higher up senior level employees and lower level. Also, various levels of useless positions have been added, such as "project accountants", "senior project accountants", "Controllers", "Senior Controllers", "Associate Directors" and "Directors". Project accountants through Senior Controllers do the same things same goes with Associate Directors and Directors. Everyone from director level up has a blackberry strapped to their hips. Accounting related e-mails are frequently sent out on Sunday evenings around 7:30 and directors clearly don't have a seperation between their home lives and work lives which makes it a tough work environment because these people tend to spread their misery to others. If life management is important, this is a terrible company to work for.

Advice to Senior Management

Get a life and don't be spineless, and get a life on the weekends and leave employee emails alone.

Pros

The people are very friendly and fantastic at what they do. Everyone is an expert in their field and does their jobs well. No stringent lines of hierarchy.

Cons

Hard work often goes unrecognized until you leave. Many "power through" episodes where you don't know if you're doing things right because there is little feedback and little time to really understand what is going on with the bigger picture of the firm. Also, groups stay to themselves - it is difficult to find out what the bigger picture is.

Advice to Senior Management

Offer more feedback. Also show more appreciation for hard work done. Continue to be fantastic at what you do though. Jerry is a very competent leader and also very caring for his employees - this should be reflected in management as well.