Toxic culture and burnout overshadow remote work flexibility - werkgeversreview Anonymous Employee bij Movement Strategy

Movement Strategy once felt like a genuinely exciting place to work. It no longer is. The agency is stuck in a permanent identity crisis, unable to commit to what it actually wants to be. The one thing that never changes is the "Move Fast" mentality which, in practice, is just a branded justification for burnout. There is no real work-life balance here. Managers will perform concern because that's what managers are supposed to do, but when a project manager snaps their fingers at 6pm on a Wednesday, you will be expected to respond. Your social life is not their problem. Neither is the fact that you've been working 10-hour days. The leadership problem runs deeper than bad hours, though. For an agency whose entire business is social media, there are a surprising number of decision-makers who don't appear to understand how social media actually works in 2026. Ideas that may have had merit on Facebook in 2012 are being championed with full confidence, and if you try to flag it, you will likely be smiled at and ignored. Then, when the content underperforms, everyone acts surprised. The downstream effect of this is real: the work is mediocre, your portfolio doesn't grow, and you're left wondering what exactly you're building here. I was asked, on a Tuesday of Thanksgiving week, whether I could log on and work that Sunday. No real notice. Just a casual ask, as if the calendar doesn't exist and as if no one really has a family or life outside of work. Layoffs are now annual. The company used to feel like it protected its people. That era is over because all of the caring leads left. Headcount goes down, workload stays exactly the same, and the people left standing are expected to quietly absorb whatever falls on the floor. AI adoption is being pushed aggressively, framed as progress, while it functionally serves as cover for cutting roles and distributing the remaining work among fewer people. PTO exists on paper. In practice, the coverage requirements are so convoluted that planning time off becomes its own project. And despite the emphasis on coverage documentation (certain people are called out by name if they don't submit one) there are ACDs who are perpetually out of office and have apparently never filed a coverage doc in their lives. Nothing happens to them. That tells you everything you need to know about how this place actually operates. Promotions follow the same logic: it is far more about proximity to the right people than it is about the quality of your work. I don't personally know anyone here who is genuinely happy or actively wants to stay.