So working at my internship, there were certainly all kinds of little things to complain about. Keeping all of the footage on-network was not a good idea. We were hilariously understaffed. We could have used faster computers but again, these are all little issues, that you can deal with, and we dealt with those.
But there’s one thing that was absolutely crippling to the company: bitter office politics created mostly by middle-management.
I’ll break it down as best I can.
We have a mega-boss: He’s the head-producer/owner. He gives out assignments tells everyone else what to go do, then they go do it. Keep in mind however, he has final approval over everything- if he doesn’t like it, you have to redo it until he does. Simple enough.
Then there’s 3 bosses under him: 2 other producers, and a producer/marketing head who lives out-of-town and is impossible to communicate with. The marketing/producer moved away a long time ago, but is the head producer’s favorite and basically works from home (when she’s reachable).
Then underneath THOSE three bosses is the producer’s assistant, who exists as a barrier to the producer. You’re not allowed to actually speak to the producers- you give your questions to the assistant, who emails the producer, gets a response, and relays said response to you, so the producer never sees or deals with you.
This is a company with like, TEN PEOPLE, by the way. How things are this convoluted, I have no idea. But anyway, I’ll give you an example of a typical day:
1.) The head owner gives a general assignment to the producers.
2.) The producers then basically decides exactly how they want it to look, then you go edit together the promo-or interstitial or whatever. If you go off script at all for any reason, be prepared to get yelled at.
3.) Then you go make it, and it has to pass the peer review of three separate producers who don’t even talk to EACH OTHER at all, so be prepared for wildly different responses. One of said producers works from home, so if they can’t be reached, work is put on hold for at least a day. If one of them doesn’t like it, start over. If you have a question for the producer, that gets relayed through the assistant, so that takes hours to get answered.
4.) So then, after hours of re-editing this one assignment over and over, the owner comes in. 90% of the time he’s ticked off because the assignment is all wrong- it wasn’t done the way HE wanted. So he says it’s garbage, start over. And then it’s back to step one!
Do you see the issue here? The producers don’t ever actually ask the owner/head director what he wants, even though he has final approval over everything. So they’ll bicker among themselves trying to get things exactly the way THEY want it, when their opinion doesn’t matter at all, and is just overridden by the owner every single time.
The result is about 8 redo’s of every single assignment, which slows the workflow down to a snail’s pace. Then nothing gets done, and everyone gets chewed out, jobs are on the line and nobody’s happy.
The obvious solution would be for the owner to just flat out bypass the producers and tell editorial exactly what he wants- skipping at least , 5 of our typical 8 re-edits right off the bat. Barring that, the producers need to simply ask the owner, in detail EXACTLY what he wants. And if he wants something crazy, we need to tell him right off the bat so we don’t waste time on it.
But lo and behold, no one communicates with anyone- it’s just a workplace culture of fear. No one wants to bring up issues with the owner, because they’re afraid he’ll snap and fire them on the spot. So when the producers don’t know what to do, they’re too terrified to ask for direction. So in typical, responsible adult fashion, they just make shit up. Which never ever goes well.
If the company could just get to a place where everyone could speak their mind and work together like not-crazy people, I really do think everything would be fine. With things the way they are now….I don’t know how this place will stay in business.