I worked for Frontiers for 2 years and despite over 25% of the company being made redundant the company is still very much run in the same way. I'm sure leadership have learned some lessons, afterall they are very smart people but this has not translated at all to any sort of organisational change in culture or strategy.
At Frontiers it is the leaderships way or the highway. Of course, no company can lead from the ground up but at Frontiers any sort of comment which goes against the leadership direction of travel is either ignored or worse still agreed with but then goes into a black hole. I was in countless meetings where the entire group (including members of the leadership team) agreed with valid points raised by team members about potential issues but in terms of addressing them, the answer was just to plough on and attempt to hit what was normally a ludacris target.
This led to serious cultural issues where leadership implemented projects with no consultation with team members actually doing the work only to then bemoan them not succeeding. There were an infinite number of projects where based on historial norms over many years of 5%-10% success rate, targets of over 50% were expected. This created more toxicity as on the projects team members just felt entirely unmotivated and didn't actually try legitimately new ideas as they knew they'd never make the target expected.
Due to these challenges there is very little motivation for staff to turn the ship around and improve things even though that is 100% what Frontiers needs and I actually believe the leadership wants. However, the leadership needs to let department leaders lead and not interfere and ask for sign off on even the smallest of things. Any attempts to say this is not what happens are either a lie by leadership or a lie by the department leaders as this is the message that comes through down to those on the ground.
I hope the company can recover, despite all of its challenges in the last 18 months it still is one of the most popular places to publish. It's not too late to recover but leadership needs to turn the company into a proper organisation that reflects its size of 1500-2500 employees and not run it like a company of 100 people. I suspect this is why it is hard for the leadership team as they had such success when the company was much smaller, and this success was incredible. However, to turn Frontiers into a reputable organisation changes need to be made.
As hard as it is to believe, I have tried to be constructive in this review!
