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Topic: Best Publishing Companies to Work For?
| Author | Message |
| GalleyCat | Posted – 10/22/2007 1:37:58 PM | show profile Book Business has published a list of the top 20 publishing workplace environments, with Random House leading the list. If you work in publishing, what's your take—was your worker's paradise overlooked? Or did your bosses manage to hide the hell they've created on earth? |
| analog | Posted – 10/22/2007 9:59:10 PM | show profile Rodale is 3? Hahaha! People flee the book division in droves. I know people personally who were driven into therapy working for them. The survey must have mistakenly queried the lovely editors of Men's Health. |
| nandy | Posted – 10/23/2007 11:12:25 AM | show profile My company proudly touts that they're named to Working Woman's Magazine 100 Best Companies for Working Parents' list. I can't say it applies in my department. Every other department here allows a regular work-at-home day for their mangerial employees (sheesh, more than half the editors are perennially "offsite" and the marketing dept is catching up fast). My supervisor does not. Of course, she's not a parent and does not have a commute-from-hell. Any company climate can be severely compromised by a department head who doesn't "get it" or thinks their department should be immune for production reasons. |
| nandy | Posted – 10/23/2007 11:14:50 AM | show profile Just looked at the list, and my company's on there, too. |
| Publishing Specialist | Posted – 10/23/2007 1:50:12 PM | show profile Rodale a great place to work? Clearly Book Business didn't do it's homework |
| Trudie | Posted – 10/23/2007 1:58:16 PM | show profile What survey? I'm wondering exactly who they "surveyed"... I'm a production editor at a major publishing house, and I never heard anything about this. (And my company isn't on the list.) If anyone in my department was questioned for such a survey, I would have heard gossip about it. So it's possible that they not only don't quote the rank and file, but didn't even question them in the first place. |
| BookSchlepper | Posted – 10/23/2007 4:29:35 PM | show profile You've got to be joking Taunton???!!? People run screaming from that place---they can't keep staff there no matter what they do. It's the worst snakepit in the industry. |
| CM | Posted – 10/23/2007 8:19:04 PM | show profile the list lists I am always suspicious of these surveys. -First of all, they're from workplaces that have access to email records. No astute employee will use company email to be honest about the company. -Secondly, the survey deals in broad generalities. Benefits are often judged in terms of what's lacking elsewhere and no one in the US had terrific health insurance. Life/work balance is an unclear notion that means one thing to a workaholic and another to someone who wants to get home to the kids. -Thirdly, nowhere does the survey mention sample size or location of sampling. What's true in London may not be true in NY. The company I work for is pretty high on the list. Despite management's declaration they have nothing to do with the these surveys, all of them go to the same 20 people, to the people as devoted to the company as a dog is to its master. For example, my company supposedly offers equal opportunity to succeed. Yet there is only one woman in management; the rest of management is white men of a certain age, all with the most extraordinary (and some with offensive and expensive) pecadillos. The dozens of women who've left because they never moved up were surveyed. Surveys like this are not as anonymous or autonomous as they should be to get an accurate result. Also asking simple questions doesn't necessarily leadd to accurate information. Sometimes you have to present a situation in such a way that the genuine answer comes out. Asking someone whether he's Christian doesn't really give detail about his beliefs, only about his identification. Same is true here. "Does the company porvide good benefits?" is less detailed than "Does your health coverage allow you to see doctors you want to see?" So, does this survey allow anyone to see into the comapny? Probably not. |
| CM | Posted – 10/23/2007 8:21:21 PM | show profile Correction I meant the women who left were not surveyed. No one who leaves, is, so the survey excludes the displeased. |
