Clear strategy and inspiring evolution - Anonymous employee GAIN Employee Review

Some of the long-tenured employees are genuinely talented and a pleasure to work with. They're the only reason morale hasn't completely collapsed. Hard to overstate how much knowledge and skill they carry.

Management has lost the plot. There's no clear vision for where this company is going anymore, just reactive decisions made on the fly. People who built this place from the ground up (back when it was TRGT, and it really was a great place to work then) are now sidelined and not trusted, despite years of loyalty and results. Micromanagement has crept in hard. Things that were never tracked or questioned before are now scrutinized constantly, which kills autonomy and trust. Workloads are unsustainable. Way too many accounts dumped on individual people with no regard for capacity. Team structures get reshuffled so often it's hard to keep up, and the constant churn makes it impossible to build any continuity. Watching colleagues you respected slowly turn into corporate yes-men to survive here is genuinely sad. Perks are handled unfairly across regions. Unlimited PTO got quietly cut for some while leadership still markets the benefits package as generous. Doesn't sit right. Also heard from people working as contractors that they're treated poorly, like an afterthought rather than part of the team. Whole place feels like it's at a boiling point. People are exhausted and burnt out, and it shows.

The managers managing my team are absolutely brilliant people. They are functioning in an incredibly dysfunctional, toxic environment. The only reason I am still here is because of them.

Where do I start. I want to make this as constructive as possible but mine (and seemingly many others') mental health is being impacted by this genuinely. There is weak leadership here at BU-level. And instead of accountability from leadership, we have had radio silence. Months into the financial year and after pestering BU leadership, we finally get some objectives, however those objectives are not clear and our questions went unanswered a month later. Clients are leaving us because their procurement strategy was to hire specialist agencies: not a large multi-service agency like GAIN. Which is expected, but instead of looking at the reasons why clients have left us, us in delivery are blamed instead for not doing enough. I look around at my team and we're answering emails on our holiday, working through sickness, picking up the phone on our days off - I don't see a lack of accountability or "slacking" around me. Our BU leader joined an all-hands call this week. Was almost 5 minutes late for "coffee". Hadn't prepared anything, but proceeded to tell us all we "need to be accountable". And if we didn't like it, "I can help you find something else". I am so disappointed in this CEO. I have worked alongside him for so many years in our old agency and this is not the behaviour I'd expect at all. I personally would never ever dream of being late to any meeting regardless of who it is - client or one of my team members without good reason. Me and my partner are TTC and we are putting this completely on hold because working here is unbearable for me. That's how much it is affecting our lives.