Facing a mass eXodus - Anonymous employee Excella Employee Review

- Bait and switch: They try to externally demonstrate innovation and agility. Internally, they shun innovation, and leadership members are all essentially old school project managers. - Hierarchical: everything lives and dies in the C-Suite. Within the C-Suite, everything lives and dies with the CEO. Execs often make major decisions without talking to those it affects and cannot be questioned. They have a a ton of agile coaches who go help other organizations, but they refuse to listen to said coaches' internally. - No strategy, worse tactics: Year after year, the execs propose some goal that leaves the entire consulting base scratching their heads. The execs then break these goals into ineffective quarterly projects that they micromanage, under the ruse of calling these projects OKRs. - Boring Work: most accounts are generic, butts-in-seats, federal contracts with toxic clients, no ability to innovate, and immovable deadlines leading to death marches. And you’ll likely be stuck on the same client for years. - No career growth: the client work certainly won’t provide new growth opportunities. And there is no path for the most senior consulting talent to move into internal roles that would help the firm. Although, there is a double standard where the internal people at HQ undeservingly get promoted to director and above level positions. -Poor salaries: pay under market and 3% raises for top performers. They say over and over they pay fair salaries (even in the comments here), but everyone who quits seems to be getting a 20-30% raise, even for lateral moves. It doesn't pass the smell test. - Bloated and ineffective internal staff: The internal staff is twice as large as it could be. The overhead costs are likely factors in small raises and the inability to promote consultants into internal roles. There seems to be much lower expectations for internal staff compared to the consulting base. It takes HQ a very long time to get traction on any internal initiative that would improve morale for consultants. - Sinking ship: they have won almost no new work in two years and most of the top-talent is quitting in droves. The slew of recent, vague, 5-star reviews definitely raises some eyebrows in regards to their authenticity given how bad retention and morale is. - Politics (not the office kind): Political conversations are very pervasive. This is led by the CEO using his company as a platform to pontificate his sanctimonious beliefs; if you don't 100% align with him, you will feel uncomfortable, especially as it empowers others to behave the same way. In the age of inclusiveness, constant politics is certainly not inclusive. - Complacent and in denial: the problems above have been brought up for years. The C-suite refuses to acknowledge them and gets defensive when these problems are mentioned. As a result, nothing changes, more people quit, and revenue continues to shrink as no new work comes in.