The company size is too large to maintain Art Gensler’s intended focus and values. The push to be the biggest might look good to clients but dilutes the brand’s actual power because behind the shiny curtain, the back of house area gets to be more messy.
For the biggest design firm, the standards and tools to execute the work are inconsistent because some big decision makers won’t invest in those resources – choosing profit over quality. Big decisions about this are made regionally. Being in a smaller office in the region means improvements are impossible. The decision makers didn’t even know who I was, and communication with them was heavily filtered through locals.
Office culture will vary quite a bit depending on what office you work at. The larger offices can be competitive, politic-y, and catty. Not unusual for large design offices, but exacerbated by the Gensler promotion structure. The smaller offices can suffer when operated by only one managing director who is out of touch with daily operations.
Pay is below average but they’ll defend it with talk about bonuses and perks and the value of the Gensler name.
With rare exceptions, you won’t be a principal if you can’t pull in a large amount of work to the firm. That means that most principal roles are 90% sales. It’s a flaw in the firm structure because (in my experience) principals are isolated from operations and project production. Sales is their job. Daily mentorship and project execution is not their job. That means they are unbillable but also paid about 2x more than the senior project team members who are billable because they’re actually executing the work. It puts principals in an ivory tower who are great at talking big but weak leaders and out of touch.
With more of a blurred line between principals and everyone else who executes the work, the pay would be more equally distributed, the staff would feel more engaged with leadership, and there would feel like a more natural path for advancing.
I was surprised that when resigning, there was no exit interview with HR – just the principal trying to convince me not to leave. They were obsessed with the “why,” but explaining the departure reasons to the person who is the main problem is a waste of time. HR apparently didn’t care about why I was leaving, I only heard from them at the last minute about getting my laptop back to them. Hence nothing will change for the team members who remain.
Job roles are fairly tightly siloed in a way that too rigid for me. Every project needed a design director that (depending on which one) wanted to micromanage the design. Progression of people to expand their role in projects is fairly slow because it’s easy to get stuck doing what you’re good at. The big machine has to move so quickly to produce project work and keep up with deadlines and fees, there isn’t always time to let people try new things. Mentorship can be challenging in the same way. It’s an industry problem, not solely a Gensler problem.
