“Company Perks” Mask Gaslighting and Toxic Culture - werkgeversreview Marketing bij Vectorworks

Don’t be fooled by free lunches, happy hours, and a seemingly relaxed company culture. You will soon find yourself being gaslighted by a leadership team that constantly causes you to question your professionalism, work ethic, and overall sanity. There is no formalized onboarding process, even though you are told in your interview that there is. Your first several months are wrought with confusion with no solid guidance; you basically need to figure things out yourself with little-to-no support. Promotions are based on seniority, not on actual expertise, leadership skills, or talent for the position. What this means: if you get in good graces with senior management/executive leadership you can be promoted fairly quickly, even if you aren’t necessarily qualified. The leadership training is by no means useful to address these gaps — they usually consist of a glorified happy hour for socializing vs. actually discussing how to enhance leadership skills. This results in poor management practices overall that trickle down to lower-level employees having to figure out processes for themselves and shoulder the heavy lifting to get work done. The company also takes advantage of lower-level employees by having them do way more than their job title entails, without proper compensation. The majority of management gets away with shoddy leadership skills and hides behind the productivity of their teams to demonstrate their value, even though they do very little to actually contribute to the success of the organization. There is a complete disregard for internal processes, which results in no real set deadlines, unnecessary urgency to produce random deliverables, and confusion between different teams/departments. This is further exacerbated by the company operating in siloes, leading to constantly duplicating efforts, a ton of misaligned priorities, and a general waste of everyone’s time. Additionally, the lack of transparency about hiring decisions, processes, etc. has caused several team members to be completely blindsided by major changes that impact their work— it appears that if you aren’t liked by executive leadership you’ll be left in the dark. Finally, inappropriate comments are consistently made with sexist/racist/misogynistic undertones (oftentimes by management), but there are no repercussions nor actions taken by HR/senior leadership to address it, even though the company claims to value diversity and inclusion.