I want to stress that I largely enjoyed my time at SAGE and, while I was there, had very little negative to say about the work or the environment. With some distance, I had to admit that I'd bought in to the myth of SAGE and was solely focused on the positives while I was there, in what I can only guess is the sort of self-delusion people adapt for survival. While the Pros were true for me, there were also Cons that I'd subconsciously avoided facing, and I want prospective employees to be able to fully reflect on the type of environment they'll be stepping into.
Fittingly, I would say that the overarching theme is "Cognitive Dissonance" or the company line not aligning with the reality.
SAGE claims to provide a good work/life balance, and I believe that can be the case for others, but it wasn't for me or most in my division. Everyone around me was consistently drowning in work and either staying late or working evenings/weekends to keep up. There are a few causes:
- Staggering reliance on email. I realize that "too much email" is a near-universal complaint about modern office life, but the influx of email here was unlike anything I'd experienced before or since. Because many colleagues are remote, the small questions and discussions that would come up organically in an office - around the water cooler or just by walking over to a colleague's desk - had to be made via email. It wasn't uncommon to get a flurry of late-night emails from colleagues who were obviously responding to messages en masse at the late hour because they had no other time.
- Frequent travel - around 30% during the semester, with theoretical breaks during the summer unless you had conferences or other meetings (and you always did). This was the case for pretty much everyone in my division. I don't have to elaborate on the ways frequent travel can tax your health, home life, and work. You were still expected to keep up with emails after grueling full days on planes, on campus, or at conferences. Very little grace was extended when you needed a few extra days to complete a project or follow up on an email in these circumstances.
- You know the phrase "work smarter, not harder?" Foreign concept at SAGE. We just... Did. So. Much. Every week was a new fire drill, deadline, project that had to be done immediately, huge meeting to prep for. The pace was relentless, nothing was automated, and everything needed approval from a whole tribunal. Worst of all, it was tough to draw a line between your unrelenting list of tasks and the monetary results/goals of the business, because at the end of the day, the work you put into something would frequently be ignored in the long term. The worst offender was the semi-annual sales meeting, which happens over three jam-packed days. It involved literal months of preparation on the part of editorial/marketing, all for a 1-hour presentation to hung over, near-indifferent sales reps who (understandably) didn't retain the info. Surely there are better ways to use our time.
Compound the workload with way too many regularly scheduled meetings. Again, it ain't unique to SAGE, but SAGE is its own brand of meeting-happy, to the detriment of being able to do the actual job. At one point, a company-wide email attempted to set best practices for meeting efficiency (keep them to 30 minutes, only invite those who *really* need to attend, etc), which managers summarily ignored and continued to keep hourlong weekly meetings on the schedule. The irony of dragging everyone in the division to a 90-minute meeting and discussing the new meeting efficiency regulations was lost on my VP.
Management knows that the workload is untenable, and will pay lip service to making things easier on everyone ("Protect your time! Decline meeting requests! Differentiate between 'must dos' and 'nice to dos'!"), but still makes the team abide by arbitrary deadlines, especially when they're set by other departments. And no one would ever actually decline a meeting. Many at SAGE have been there a long time and, like the lobster in boiling water, they can't feel how bad it's gotten.
Put it this way: I let my manager know on days when I needed to leave *on time* (i.e. my full 8 hour shift). The default was working over.
SAGE has the veneer of family friendliness, largely because of the excellent health care that covers the whole family and other superficial signifiers like a kids Halloween party and company picnic. Yet between the workload and travel, the company puts incredible demands on staff, leaving them precious little time to devote to family or, really, anything outside of work. When someone receives a plaque at the Christmas meeting and the CEO touts the employee and lists all of the family events she sacrificed for her job, the message is subtly but effectively delivered: it is expected that you will put work above family. Congrats on having a kids Halloween party every year, but the real way to improve things for families is to not burden them with workload and travel. Oh yeah, there's no official maternity leave policy either, which is bizarre since all the worker bees are women of childbearing age. Oh wait, maybe that's the point.
SAGE has a rigid corporate structure, hierarchy, and obsession with levels. Some ways this manifests:
- Inconsistently applied policies depending on "level." While I can appreciate that you earn more privileges as you move up the chain, it was hard not to feel a gulf of separation between me and more "senior" colleagues, even though our jobs were essentially the same (though mine without the attendant salary and title). Very differing policies on remote work (i.e. some colleagues worked remotely all the time, while others had to ask permission for the occasional work from home day) and different levels of trust and autonomy - again, we were all doing the same job with the same travel obligations and deadlines, but with differing titles came different treatment.
- Micromanagement. Lack of empowerment at manager level and no one felt they could make decisions. Decisions had to be run up the chain for even minor things (like, Directors needed to approve convention swag). But I understand why, because the culture was deferential to a fault, and there were consequences to proceeding in a different direction than your manager, even for minor things. Working here had me questioning my instincts and constantly running things by other people for their approval.
- Having to do more travel, usually to crappier conferences/cities. This might just be my personal experience, though.
SAGE's culture isn't overtly toxic - no screaming in the hallways, tense meetings, or pervasive culture of harassment. What was a problem was more minor challenges like indirect communication (i.e. things framed as "suggestions" when they were actually directives, but weren't communicated as such), ideas being rephrased by "higher level" people and then suddenly being seen as brilliant, and favoritism. Favorites were given promotions into positions that hadn't even been announced - just "Surprise, so and so is promoted!" Usually via email. Management was surreptitiously choosing favorites to promote and not even giving others a chance to be considered. The more sinister side of this coin was re-organizations that ousted just one or two people - happened enough times for me to notice and find it upsetting. There are also a few instances of "promotions" that involve taking on the responsibilities of a role above you without receiving the corresponding pay/title.
There are very demanding signing requirements (both in quantity and revenue potential) which puts tremendous pressure on editors to develop projects with potential authors and sign books by any means necessary. As a result, sometimes books would get published that simply shouldn't have been, whether it was because there was an entrenched competitor, the book had no clear unique selling point, or the market wasn't interested in the book. Everyone was still surprised when these books did not sell. That the company is now facing some financial troubles should not come as a surprise, either. You have to decide if you're ok with that, but don't expect the kind of job security SAGE has largely provided until now.
