To preface, I worked on the same team as the former employee who wrote the review titled “Poor management, worse pay” that was posted here on Glassdoor on June 25th, 2022.
Despite the folks I worked with in the office being generally very nice and welcoming, I did have to interact with some individuals who had a tendency to be very toxic. Within my first six months, I went to the desk of a former colleague asking for advice on how to build stronger relationships with the brokers I supported. She turned to me and said “That's a joke. No one here will ever give a **** about you”, laughed, and then turned away to face her computer and continue working. Earlier this year, when I was struggling with my confidence in the quality of work I was providing and looking for support, a different former colleague looked at me and said "No one here respects you, or can ever respect you, because they don't respect your work". Despite this, however, ultimately the reason I left has all to do with the regional research director.
Our director, would (and from what I’ve heard, still does) frequently come in late or leave early and not let anyone know (no text, no email). He would schedule PTO and rarely tell us- we would sometimes know if he happened to mention it on a Teams call, though usually we just found out by logging in and seeing his Out of Office auto-reply. If we needed any help from him while he was out, we were required to wait until he got back as he refused to let us go to any of his peers for help. If we had deadlines (that he himself had implemented and were exclusive to those of us who reported to him) and we missed those deadlines due to his absence or delay in providing edits/feedback, he would not take any accountability and we were given full blame, reprimanded, and then thrown under the bus to our brokers, clients, and leadership.
When I would go to him with questions or for training and support, he would tell me to go to one of my peers, Google, or Youtube because he didn't know and he didn't have time to help me learn (or learn himself) because he was "up to here" with other work. Reports and/or projects he claimed he was working on for us, our brokers, or our clients never got published or shared with us, and even when we asked, he would refuse to let us see them. The only deliverables that he takes credit for that I know actually exist are two internal Excel databases (unique to our team/region) that he claims to have created, but he told me in a meeting once that he took directly from his former employer- a competitor, CBRE- when he came to work for Colliers. When I asked why we were using something taken from a competitor years ago (I'm under the impression he even kept the same data validation drop down options), I was told that it was "because this is the way we do it".
Despite multiple meetings with HR on the subject of the director, nothing was ever resolved or even made a little bit better, and when I attempted to speak to others at higher levels about the issues mentioned above, I was essentially told that this is how things are done at Colliers, and if I didn't like it I could leave. So I did.
