Dysfunctional Hype Train - Anonymous employee Pavilion Employee Review

The business has no direction; its tactics are set by emotional, knee-jerk reactions without any overarching strategy. The company has halved in the past year, each layoff preceded only by praise of everyone’s performance and reports of financial solvency. After-the-fact justifications are presented with self-flagellation, poor reasoning, and the occasional condescension, but never with a significant change in direction. These are cold comforts to those let go during their parental leave, within a day before meaningful severance is required, or as part of a sacking of multiple teams without warning that anything was awry. Leadership communicates either too much (eg. mandating two all-staff meetings every week, micromanaging through high demands and publicly-exposed OKRs) or too little (vague magical thinking about the future vision of the company). The root cause is clear: the CEO cannot differentiate between his own feelings and the health of the business as a whole; remaining leadership, while capable in their own right, refuse and rebuff any attempts to speak truth to power, thus depriving themselves of constructive feedback. Everyone else is left scrambling to toe the shifting company line to support a rapidly-churning set of disillusioned members. The company’s ideal of “kindness” is reduced to a saccharine veneer, covering directionless leadership desperately huffing its own vibes to maintain a high after a trail of broken promises.