Q&A With Grand Circle Corporation Employees

Tell me about a time when you had to put pressure on a colleague, and what was the outcome? Give an example of a time when you took one step than you thought you could. What's the most courageous thing you've done?

Pretty much all hires need to go through an initial two hour "culture" interview, where they bring together all candidates being considered during a given week, and put them together to do some team-based exercises. People who do well in get to move on and meet the actual hiring teams for their roles. People who do not do well, are sent home. It's actually a very effective tool, and plays a key role in allowing them to hire nice people who work well together with others. Unfortunately, they then get to work in a company where those skills aren't effectively leveraged--beyond the fact that nice people are more likely to put up with a lot of the BS that gets thrown at them.

Technology hiring is up, and they work to modernize and move more fully into the internet age (they're still very much a "direct mail" house). The call center (highest turnover with lowest employee satisfaction).

Get rid of the ridiculous and unfair quarterly performance reviews. There are two fatal flaws to the reviews. The first one goes back to a feedback mechanism they use, which although useful in other contexts, makes no sense in this case. In meetings, they like ask a question and have people do a finger-shoot, where 5 fingers is best and 1 finger is lowest, but to avoid fence-sitting, they say "no threes." That's fine for a finger shoot, but how it got applied of performance reviews is beyond me! So basically, as a manager, you're asked to rate your employee's performance on a scale of 1-5, but you can't give anyone a 3--even though arguably most people would be a 3. So you're often put in the position of giving someone a 2, who really is not a "D" player. Worse, they then force you to rank everyone in the department. In my case, I was one of 12 people in a department but only 1 person could be #1 (in the rankings), while we basically had to pick someone to get the lowest ranking

It's actually pretty good. By no means is it a sweat-shop. In my department, most people are gone by 5:00 pm.

For the call center: once you've worked in-house for a full-year, you do have the opportunity to work from home after that (the set up their phone system to route calls to your home office number). For other positions, it's more the exception rather than the norm, but there are a few people there who have managed to get remote roles, however, mostly only after having worked in-house first.

20 days of PTO to start. However, you need to work there for 6 months before you can even put in a request to take time off! It then goes up from there. 26 days once you've hit the 2 year mark. They also have a paid 4 week Sabbatical at 5 years (in addition to the regular PTO). Note, however, that you're required to take one of their trips (free for you and a companion). Most people take the 21-day Australia/New Zealand trip.

To a certain extent it's a popularity contest. The key is to make sure and not offend (or even appear to slight in any way) their owner. However, if you can avoid that, there is opportunity to move up the ladder and actually be promoted, since invariably somebody above you makes a wrong move and gets fired. They do pay very well, so it's kind of like one of those video games where you just keep going, pushing to get to the next level until you eventually lose all of your available "lives" and then it's game over!