Pluspunten
The best part about Rho, by far, is all the great coworkers I had my first 7-8 years. It was truly a team environment with smart, dedicated, and hard working people. The benefits I had were nice, but I also worked here for several years and the longer you work, the better your benefits (more PTO, less out-of-pocket costs for health insurance). By the time I left, I had a pretty nice benefits package for me and my family. Rho boasts a strong culture when they hire you and they talk about their culture a lot. When it comes to my peers and the teams I worked with for most of my years there, I definitely saw this on a daily basis. When it comes to some of the CXO personnel and senior management, this changes a bit. They had a lot of leadership changes the last few years and they brought in a lot of people from outside the company, instead of promoting from within, which was kind of new for them. Some corporate values are really valued by leadership and others just feel like lip-service. In my opinion, the culture was much stronger and better pre-pandemic, pre-COVID layoffs, and pre-leadership changes. See the "Cons" for more on this.
Minpunten
Rho was already making big culture changes before COVID. When the pandemic hit, they immediately laid off a lot of staff (like the first month we went virtual). They said they layoffs were for financial reasons, and I sort of believe that, but they went on to have some of their best profits the next few years so it's kind of hard to think it was purely financial. Based on who they laid off, it also looked less like financial hardship and more like an excuse to cut people who weren't part of their revamped culture and identity. What was this new identity? It seemed to be less about putting people first and more about turning a sizeable profit. The charm Rho had when I started was it's relatively small size compared to other CROs and the family feel. When I left, it was all about how much money could be made and how much we could grow. The irony is that we were almost always profitable and the company had nice profit-sharing bonuses most of the years I was there. But evidently they wanted to be making more profit. Don't get me wrong, I have no objections to a company trying to perform better and improve their bottom line, but it came at the cost of losing some really great employees and people who had worked at the company for a long time in really important roles. A number of really great people were cut during the layoffs, but a lot of long-timers left of their own choosing in the years that followed. I've talked to a lot of former Rho employees, and many of them left for the same reason I did; they saw the culture shift and decided to leave. Essentially, the company started to look more and more like the other CROs I've been at. There was no real reason to stay just for the so-called culture when I could make more money elsewhere with essentially equally great people and strong culture. I thought Rho was special when I first started working there. Then, they kind of became just like everyone else in the CRO industry. The only problem is they still acted like they were different and special, when they really weren't anymore.