The Place to Be - Associate Manager Evidence Action Employee Review

Evidence Action is a mission-driven organization that genuinely lives its values. The work is meaningful, impact-focused, and grounded in data, which makes it especially rewarding to be part of the team. Leadership is thoughtful and accessible, and there is a strong culture of trust, collaboration, and respect across teams. People here are smart, humble, and deeply committed to doing good work without ego. I’ve also appreciated the organization’s openness to learning and improvement—there is a real willingness to invest in systems, processes, and people to support long-term sustainability. Work-life balance is generally respected, especially considering the global nature of the work.

As with many fast-growing, mission-driven organizations, some processes and systems are still evolving. This can occasionally mean ambiguity, shifting priorities, or heavier workloads during peak periods. Cross-functional coordination can sometimes take extra time due to the organization’s scale and distributed teams.

Programs have real impact and are implemented by talented, committed local staff. Somewhat less top-down than many other NGOs. Colleagues are intelligent, mission-driven, and humble. No toxic personalities. Compensation and benefits are okay for the sector. Extremely flexible on hybrid work, with many remote employees.

The organizational structure is matrixed to the point of dysfunction. Decision-making is slow, consensus-heavy, and bogged down by politics. Senior leadership is reactive, shortsighted, and barely capable of making decisions only when something is in immediate crisis. They will spend literally months talking and planning in circles, without action. Direction is left incredibly vague, if not completely absent. Basic principles of management, planning, strategy, and leadership are foreign concepts. Clear inequities exist between global staff and local staff in terms of pay, titles, and promotion pathways. These disparities are well-known internally, but leadership is too paralyzed to address it. Promotions are a black box. Performance evaluations are completely subjective and determined exclusively by your direct supervisor, despite getting 360 input. The organization doesn’t apply its own values of rigor and objectivity to itself or its people. There’s zero accountability for senior leadership - they can (and do) perform poorly without repercussion. The organization clearly and consistently demonstrates that it doesn’t care about its people. “Our people are our best asset” is something you never hear here. Coaching is absent, learning tapers off after a year, feedback mechanisms are weak, and leadership shows little interest in genuinely engaging with staff perspectives. Layoffs and restructuring decisions have been handled poorly, with minimal communication or reflection (staff who have worked there for years have been laid off without warning for reasons that can be drawn back to senior leadership’s negligence, and they don’t even care enough to give them an exit interview).