1. Almost all office perks have been taken away. There are no longer company retreats, a lunch program, nap room, personal education funds, snacks of any type, Thursday drinks, working from home, sports teams, or quarterly team outings. Anything that could easily be removed to cut costs has been done
2. It doesn’t matter if you go above and beyond, there isn’t really any manager who recognizes members of their teams properly. I’ve seen many people go way beyond their job scope and never seen any praise, recognition, compensation, or really anything
3. There’s a good chance you will be “asked”/told to do something entirely unrelated to your job and “take one for the team” even if it means your role entirely changing. I saw one employee who loved their role and had no choice to leave because they were given an ultimatum to take on an entirely different role or resign
4. Turnover is extremely high and there are very few Senior employees left. Over 25 fully qualified employees have left or been fired by EventMobi in 2017 alone. This includes the Co-founder/CTO and senior leaders from all departments, all of which were not replaced when I was there. One fire includes the CEO explaining to the whole company in a weekly meeting that someone was fired because they didn’t agree with everything that he said and would provide their own opinion in meetings
5. There is a severe gossip culture in the company. Everyone, including management and senior leadership casually engage in unconstrained conversation about other people in the company, including rumours about management sleeping with their direct employees
6. There is no longer an HR department as senior leadership didn’t believe the company needed it anymore. This means if you have any issues, questions, concerns, you have to go directly to the CEO or the COO. This is a lost cause because they have absolutely no sympathy for any situation. They hired an external consultant and employees have the option to call them or see them once every few months if they come by the office
7. Compensation is nowhere near competitive and most salaries are under the industry average. The reality is that employees share this information and management uses intimidation tactics in order to pressure you and keep your salary low. The only way I’ve seen employees get salary increases is by threatening to leave and bringing in an offer from another company
8. There is absolutely no regard for work life balance. If out of the blue management decides they need something done ASAP, you are expected to complete it. Often tasks which should take weeks are put on your plate and you have no choice but to stay late to complete them. People are given far too much work or forced to take on the positions of people that have left because the company has absolutely no plans to hire someone new since they can save money and force you to do it. I have seen many employees burnout from this
9. The only reason the company made Great Places to Work is because employees were literally forced to provide feedback. Multiple company wide Slack messages and manager reminders were given to ensure that you filled it out with a high score
10. I understand there are some good reviews, however there are a few reasons for this. At least 4 reviews on the site were requested by the company as senior leadership sent out emails requesting employees to write perfect reviews. I’m aware of this as I know the people that wrote the reviews. Other reviews are often entry level positions and people of which this is their first job out of school. For the inexperienced person, they do not realize all of the issues with the company as they have nothing to compare to