Waggener Edstrom Worldwide Reviews in Portland, OR Area

Pros

Great people, lots of opportunity for advancement, great benefits including 4 weeks paid time off, sabbatical program, innovative and collaborative culture

Cons

Depending on who your manager is and how the leadership of the team values work/life balance, employees can sometime have differing experiences.

Advice to Senior Management

Continue to keep employees in the loop regarding the direction of the company and how the agency is committed to keep employees inspired. Stellar employees need to be reminded that the agency cares about their career and their future.

Pros

The salary and benefits are great in my experience, the office is nice, and an effort is made to make employees feel welcome. Infrastructure teams offer scheduling flexibility (particularly to working mothers). Many great co-workers. Looks wonderful on a resume (interviewers nearly always mention it in a positive light). Dynamite internship program. Great place for the young single go-getter "rock star" to climb the corporate ladder relatively quickly.

Hours provided to volunteer, and many in-house events such as health fairs, etc.

Cons

The biggest and most glaring is a lack of work-life balance, and inflexible scheduling. All teams claim to be the exception to the rule in the interview process, but the reality (particularly on the MS account teams, which is most of the agency) is that the workload is consistently such that a team member can't properly accomplish their assigned tasks without putting in 60-70 hours per week. It wasn't unusual to see multiple team members still working away at 6:30 or 7 pm or even later, and then leave to go home and work more on their laptop.

The leadership tends to be out of touch. Example: One set of VPs "gifted" one of the account divisions with half-day Fridays for a month, "provided all work had been completed", only to be met with snickers from all, who knew there was no way all work could be completed even in a full week. The VPs left at noon to "Set the example" each Friday--everyone else continued until all hours as normal.

Woeful lack of understanding of true integrated digital communications. Their unwavering commitment to the old ways of PR (leadership is comprised of 20 year veterans, account teams of recent U of O grads) and to superfluous amounts of rigid process keep them from making real impact in many cases. This is particularly detrimental given their tech focus, where the competition is often faster and nimbler.

Infrastructure teams are much less glamorous, less often in the spotlight, but also offer much better work life balance. Those teams seem happier and healthier than the account teams, and would recommend them much more readily. Also MUCH more flexibility in scheduling there.

If cheery verbal encouragement and a good financial/benefit bottom line are worth 60 hours of your week, you can grow here quickly and effectively. Otherwise, I personally recommend you look elsewhere to find an agency where overtime is the exception, leadership is willing to invest in the mid-levels as much as the interns, and big ideas are welcomed with open arms.

Advice to Senior Management

The nice facilities, great benefits and verbal overtures about how much WE values its employees make for a great entrance to the agency. The leadership seems to really believe in these ideals, its just that they just never seem to realize that the values are only being lived out in a verbal fantasy world. In reality, overworked talent gets burned out, underappreciated, overloaded, over-critiqued, looked over, and so on. When each new wave of once-eager talent suddenly and unceremoniously departs, management never seems to question why or attempt to curb the tide. Please start to question it--ask why people are willing to leave a job with a good salary in this economy, even if the person tells you they just "found another opportunity". They may just feel too unappreciated. stifled, or insignificant to tell you the truth on their way out.

Also,

-reduce the excessive attention to process over impact, you're wasting talent and hundreds of hours on needless briefings, re-caps, meetings about meetings, etc.
-learn the fundamentals of true digital communications , and then lead with them. You have the size and resources to compete with the big agencies, if you are willing to truly innovate.
-don't let your mid-level people get lost in the fray. They are some of your strongest talent. If you had a way to develop and invest in them as much as the interns, your retention would go up. VPs and Interns are largely the only ones with exposure to our founders, for example. Promote them more--recognize them more, rather than only remembering to meet with them when there's a new project to drop on them or when they are being reviewed.
-re-vamp the annual company meeting. It's not helpful in its current form. We want to meet other teams, interact with top leadership, get REAL answers (not PR answers), and dream together. We don't care if it's messy--but it should have more real substance.

Pros

Excellent benefits, nice offices (even though a cube environment), strong and longstanding commitment to community giving (including paid volunteerism), and robust internship program and international exchange program.

Cons

Notice the recent rash of positive reviews? They may be true but they are also the product of a PR push for boosting employee satisfaction rankings. This is exactly how WE operates: managing perceptions but not truly addressing the real issues. Employees are either brand new, just graduated interns who cycle through the agency and out in 2 years, or are career stalwarts, long-timers with 15+ years. While moving leaders around to manage fundamentally different departments of the company can often bring new ideas, innovation, and energy, more often it is used as a reward rather than a strategic move in response to a business need. Sometimes decisions are swift (like laying off senior members of IT to bring on entry level help desk reps), and other times leadership is paralyzed, not getting rid of bad managers below them who consistently make bad business decisions because it is easier to ignore them or do nothing.

Advice to Senior Management

You are doing many things right, but need to get back to the basics and master those. Business needs to be profitable. Do long-term relationship building with clients; don't just cycle through new accounts. International offices are not for show, they are for business. Make long term strategic goals and stick to them; don't just go through the motions. Bring on external consultants to objectively evaluate leadership, then take their advice. If you get real business leaders in there and you treat the agency as a business instead of a group of friends (some of whom you talk to, others you shun, depending on mood), then you might be surprised at how much real progress and profit is made. Then the story you tell will be the story you live.

Pros

Super interesting work - always a new challenge, never boring.

Waggener Edstrom has excellent benefits for employees. I especially appreciate the open-minded health benefits that give access to alternative care.

Open to having employees work from home several days a week or even full-time. Some peole have alternate schedules as well, having proven themselves. Love the flexibility.

Generous with corporate giving, even offering $ to each employee on request for the charity of their choice.

Cons

Feels like what you give is never enough. If you're not giving a minimum of 110% every day, you're slacking, to the point that frenetic activity wins out over deliberate plans.

Our senior manager is overly optimistic and sets unattainable business goals, which we struggle to meet. It's de-motivating after a while to never feel truly successful.

Work-life balance is hard. For many, the only way to achieve it seems to be to give up on career growth.

Sometimes the intense and demanding nature of the work bleeds over, and one becomes intense and demanding (unpleasant) with others inside and outside of work.

Advice to Senior Management

Senior managers often seem out of touch with reality of life in the trenches. Pay attention, make it safe to provide feedback, and be open to what people are saying. If people keep saying the same thing, maybe it's true.

If we're going to have a bunch of mid-year promotions every year, change to a formal bi-annual review cycle. People feel bad when HR policies don't apply uniformly across the board.

Most of our leadership has good judgment, but a couple of teams are clicquish, starting at the top with SVPs and EVPs. Hold them accountable, and make it clear across the board that sorority-style nastiness, favoritism and homogeneity are not the goal.

Don't let short-sighted up-and-comers chase away great brains with historical/global perspective. Several great thinkers have been marginalized or let go recently.

Pros

The people I work with are among the smartest I have ever worked with. I have really been able to grow my career here through exciting global work. I have also felt recognized and acknowledged for my hard work on an on-going basis.

Cons

This is a very fast paced environment and that can be exhausting at times. The focus on quality and continuous improvement which is one of the best things about working here is also at times one of the things that can contribute to the fatigue.

Advice to Senior Management

Keep growing and developing the vision and keep the focus on our great people. Continue to be transparent with communication about our direction and future.

Pros

Really great people. I learned a lot and felt very inspired. Loved that the company spends time and money to help both locally and globally.

Cons

Too many hours. It was too hard on my family. Could be just perfect for someone in a different situation.

Advice to Senior Management

Rewarded managers for being good managers. The success and satisfaction of the people who report to a manager should be how they're measured.

Pros

Great senior management, and place to launch PR career. Superb resources for personal and professional growth. Collaborative environment, fast paced, great benefits.

Cons

Be prepared for long hours and a shift in work/life balance for the worse. A very process oriented company, it will be difficult at times to have direct impact with your creativity.

Advice to Senior Management

Best practices and processees are good, but there needs to be a greater openness to creativity, and implementation of new methods. More collaboration across teams.

Pros

great and smart people, global opportunities, leading clients, strong ideas about how PR/strategic communications is evolving and mapping to changes. personal accountability is key if you want to succeed.

Cons

long hours, sometimes difficult clients, not all managers are willing to take the time to mentor or communicate as necessary.

Advice to Senior Management

Remember to listen to the "worker bees" as they have valuable insight into the needs of clients from a relationship perspective. And while large teams are sometimes necessary, think about how to create better efficiencies within each team -- there is a lot of overlap and unnecessary "reviewing" happening.

Pros

Great people, professional development opporutunities.

Cons

Cubicle environment and opportunity to travel to different offices.

Advice to Senior Management

Keep employees involved in vision work.

Pros

The people are awesome. I've made many friends at WE and everyone is super supportive. Great benefits, flexible schedule, and decent compensation if you negotiate early.

Cons

It is extremely difficult to move up. There are very few opportunities to become a Sr. Analyst and even smaller of becoming a Manager which makes it almost cut-throat at the Analyst level. There are people who play the brown-nosing and political games to get ahead and its discouraging when you see the antics work. Absolutely no distinction between Associate Analyst and Analyst - which I'm not sure who this hurts more (Associates are paid less; Analysts hardly do any analysis).

There definitely is a gap between management and lower tier employees.

Advice to Senior Management

Create Job Distinction - have a coordinator do the work of a coordinator and an analyst of an analyst. When you hire people in their late 20s - early 30s, they want to move up and/or build skills. If you want a data entry monkey, hire a recent graduate. They'll be happy to get experience and get paid a low salary.

Bridge the Gap - between management and lower tier. We have no idea what you are doing (or if you actually are doing anything) while we do all the hard work.