Reply to What Cringe Company Office Culture Made You Quit?

Forum Index » Jobs and Careers

Reply to "What Cringe Company Office Culture Made You Quit?"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]OK, worst place I ever worked, here was the culture:

- Most staff were hired based on personal relationships. Meaning that a significant portion of the staff were related to, lived with, friends with, the former nanny of, etc. of someone in a hiring position. I did not get my job this way and went through a formal interview process. It quickly became clear that this made me a second class employee.

- Rampant gossip culture, which is not surprising when half the staff live together, are married to, have prior friendships with, are related to, etc one another. It wasn't water cooler gossip -- that can be bad but not nearly as bad as this. Nope, this was senior management gossiping with rank and file staff about other members of rank and file staff during off hours while socializing. There was no sense among management that this might be unprofessional or detrimental to work culture -- several of them drove the gossipy culture and actively encouraged it because they believed it was a good way for them to know what was going on with their employees.

- No formal policies for resolving internal conflict. Everything was handled ad hoc, whether it was someone interested in a promotion or a complaint of harassment against someone in the organization. A somewhat nebulous group of managers (some were constant and had formal titles, others were not technically management but were personally close to the people in management and therefore included in these decisions sometimes for unclear reasons) would discuss the issue, often outside of work, and then make decisions that were communicated with as much opacity as possible, like via a single email from a low level manager with no explanation. You couldn't complain because it was never clear who had made the decision or why. So what people would do instead is complain to coworkers, and which would inevitably get fed back to managers via the gossip loop described above, which would result in yet another secret ad hoc decision, and so on and so forth. Just delightful.

There's more but those are the high points. This was also a place that like to say, constantly, "We're a family!" and "We take care of each other." I spent about 6 years there, somehow, largely because I really passionately loved my actual job and my clients. Now when I think back on those years, I can't believe I stayed as long as I did. I think I had Stockholm syndrome. I think the people I worked with who are still there, years later, definitely do. I think most of the manager there have personality disorders.[/quote]

Company name start with 'D'? [/quote]

Hold up, I thought pretty much every workplace was like this. If it’s not, you’re lucky. [/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics