Great Place - Project Manager GRAYBOX Employee Review

I've been at a variety of places, and GRAYBOX is a place that fills up my hunger for unique projects. Our engagements range from large product and strategy platforms to quick hit campaigns. I love being able to keep agile and learn from the new partners we take on. The team here feels like a family and I have flexibility and ownership to manage my time and work.

Like every agency, there are times when we have to stick to constraints. I'll take the trad-offs of some smaller budget engagements to have opportunities to work with unique passionate companies.

Mostly cool people on the team, interesting projects and clients

Base salaries are low and supplemented with performance-based bonuses that are based on billable hours. Logged billable hours can be lowered by Account Managers if they feel like you spent too much time on a task, and there's very little transparency into how you're tracking towards billable hours goals, and what hours actually count towards that number. Tasks that had clear scoped hours were always scoped really tightly, with no additional time factored in for communication, internal/client review or revisions. Billable hours goals were not adjusted for PTO or paid holidays, which de-incentivized using PTO and made people feel like they had to "make up" any time off, including holidays, in order to meet billable hours targets to qualify for bonuses. Accrued vacation time was decent but employees are only granted 2 sick days annually, so vacation time must be used for additional sick days. When I started, I was told that the low salaries with performance-based bonuses and the minimal sick time were temporary measures to ensure that the company became profitable again after a rough previous year. A few months later, I was told that the CEO had changed his mind and that this was how things would be for the foreseeable future. Insurance benefits are decent but the company only covers a small percentage of that cost for employees. The system they use for insurance enrollment is dated and tedious; they accidentally enrolled me in the wrong parent company's insurance plan and had to move me and my dependents to the right plan, which took about a week and ended up being really inconvenient, as my child had a scheduled checkup that week.