Actions Speak Louder Than Words - Anonymous employee BetterUp Employee Review

Ultimately, my experience working at and exiting BetterUp has felt like an emotional trauma, and I am grateful to now feel like I'm healing. As I connect with others who have left BetterUp, the negative experience rings true across the board. I wish I could authentically recommend BetterUp to everyone who sees the false advertising and dreams of a company that offers stay interviews and 4-day work weeks and psychological safety, that has black women on their leadership team page and not just the front page of their website, but unfortunately this isn't the case. The most important things to know as you read this and other reviews is that it is true from my experience that new hires are asked to fill out a review during onboarding (which is why there are so many meaningless one sentence submissions) and that what is shared about bad managers and nepotism has deeply resonated with many employees, including poor psychological safety practices stemming downwards from the C suite. I experienced this personally and not just through hearsay. I'm going to focus briefly on the gaps in managing downwards, establishing an HR function, and appropriately using positive psychology. Far too many managers of managers evaluate these managers by their willingness to jump into any project (even those they're unqualified for) and their IC-level performance, versus how they manage the people below them. This is a key reason why bad managers continue to work at the org, and why incompetent people are promoted into the wrong roles. If you have a bad manager, you will likely not have the safety to flag it to their manager or to HR, which is critical to understand before accepting a role here. Part of the reason that this is the case is because the HR function is immature for a company of this size, which may be partly due to the founders' desire to continue being in the weeds. HR does not seem to have the independence they need to work with managers on hiring, promotion, and termination, and the founders still had veto power over these decisions when I was at the org (which is a major red flag for bias in the recruiting process). I found that my conversations with HR were highly skewed to protecting the business, and I never witnessed a moment (personally or hearing through others) where I saw HR serve as a consultative partner to the C-suite instead of executing their directives. I'm amazed by the amount of ex-BetterUppers I've spoken with who were told repeatedly before leaving that they had a "victim mindset" - when this term was used against me directly, it was after I had worked to self-solve a problem for several months and was coming to my skip-level boss and HR as a last resort. From my personal experience and having watched it happen to several others, this term was used whenever an employee flagged a systemic issue that required BetterUp to make a process or personnel change, and the organization pulled on its positive psychology foundation to reiterate how the individual should solve things simply by changing their own mindset. These practices make it nearly impossible for successful D&I initiatives to take root at the company, and they deeply facilitate a culture of the organization gaslighting their own employees. I think that if I had to identify the main emotion causing my own traumatic responses to working here, it is that I felt continually gaslit by those in power. As a final encouragement for you to consider (I do know that it sucks that BetterUp may not actually be an ideal place to work for!), I would at least make sure that you don't accept a job at the company unless you've spoken with a few past or current employees outside of your direct recruiting process (in which the positive will obviously be skewed due to the team's desire to fill a headcount and distribute their workload).