Konrad Group reviews

Within the last year, 50% of the design team have either been laid off or left. For a company that proudly boasts a positive work culture, the employee retention rate is abysmally low. Konrad group hires young, impressionable, straight out of college employees and promotes annually. While being promoted annually may sound enticing, it’s often without merit and a apart of the business effort to retain employees. It’s not an approach that works. What this in turn leads to are team members who lack leadership experience pressing unrealistic timelines, chaotic workloads and have low emotional intelligence. 

As a woman in the workplace, I sadly felt like I could not thrive. Leaderships inability to present themselves as an authentic, constant and consistent role model truly trickles from the top perpetuating a very negative work culture. A different review on Glassdoor wrote that it often feels like a boys club, this is in fact true. Management and senior leadership in the New York office are predominately white males - there is no diversity, which is also a major red flag. When you leave Konrad, you’re silenced and asked to keep your resignation notice a secret amongst your team. It’s a disturbingly odd practice. The lack of common human decency to celebrate an individual persons choice to move on is appalling, but what is even more disturbing are the weekly emails that read as an obituary when employees are fired without reason. 

In regards to benefits, don’t be fooled by the benefit offer of 20 days of PTO. What they do not disclose is 5 days of the 20 being offered is apart of the company holiday shut down. Sick days, which New York State requires at least 40 hours, are also baked into this 20 day package. You are technically being offered 7 days of PTO on an accrued basis.

I don't even know where to start because there are too many. Whatever I write I am honest and have shared many of the same sentiments with colleagues. - The fact that the company tries to even boost its glassdoor rating by adding in filler reviews like "5 stars Management", when clearly lots of the reviews try to highlight the many problems management has but refuse to rectify, should say a lot about the company. - Just in case some people are wondering about compensation package. Industry average, not great, not terrible. Nothing competitive, pretty much the exact opposite. Not sure about management level. - NO Human Resources, at least when I was there...they have People Services, which is not HR apparently for a global company reaching 500 employees. Weird. If you have a problem, can't go to a third party group within the company. - Sometimes, more like most of the times, upper management seems delusional in many different aspects. Like another review said, they keep highlighting how choosy and exclusive they are, as if they are close to Deloitte, McKinsey, other consultancies. Means almost nothing when they don't offer nearly as much as these established companies do, don't really treat all employees with the same respect and trust, handle leaves immaturely, and don't really care about professional development. They are choosy with whom they hire, but have trouble retaining great employees. They do not know what the company needs sometimes. I think it's weird they keep emphasizing hiring lower levels when clearly they need more experienced leaders. - Management is defensive. They are scared of taking ownership of mistakes, have unrealistic expectations of some people, clear favoritism which leads to not providing a supportive culture that permeates the company...all about painting themselves as amazing leadership. - Company doesn't actually care about professional development, if they were serious about this, then all teams in the company would feel supported. However, in my team, it was encouraged to ask for help, support and mentorship, only to have team leaders say there's no time for that and if needed, this place isn't a good fit for that. Some of my colleagues felt otherwise in their team, but this goes to show that this company doesn't take seriously about your long term development because not all teams have the same mentality. They want people who can churn out great work for non-competitive pay. In my experience, a manager said he or she "accidentally" chose to help or mentor another person. What was this motivated by? Could be an amalgamation of factors. But worth noting that there is very, very minimal female leadership, thus diversity in thought and leadership. Only now I think there's more emphasis on this, but whether management truly cares about it is up in the air. Also, hard for them to stomach criticism and take action, I've seen direct management point fingers. This could also just be that their hands are tied in some way or another. - Bad communication all around. They say it's because they're busy. Well everyone is busy. People can't help each other if they're shut out or just suddenly expected to know everything. Was unfortunately blamed for other people's mistakes, which shouldn't be the case, and in some cases, in front of other colleagues. This also just ties back to what the company doesn't always mean that they're here to support and help you. - Sometimes this may lead to poor team work, and thereby compromise of client's work. Some of my ideas overridden by managers, which is fine, but they had minimal work in the project itself; later on realized that client liked what other people have worked on better before the managerial edits. - Some of my colleagues felt like they were forced to go to socials, and I can definitely see that. Could really depend on who your team lead is, but some can be pushy. - BUT I must say that the socials really help people develop great friendships with one another, which is why I say that you really can have great, true friends at KG. So this is a plus, as mentioned. - Since management isn't really building out a very good baseline of people, not actually taking to heart what they say (they can listen, but just brushes over their shoulder), they make work harder for themselves. Then they can't help you, etc. Bad cycle. They continue to show favoritism to a few, and it's very clear. - Management just seem to look out for themselves sometimes, and just want to look good to upper management (for promotion, I guess). - And what the other reviews said, no training (even though was promised) and development; minimal mentorship. Over a decade in this business, and none of these core things are set.