Working with the company was the most traumatizing experience in my career, causing extreme burnout and anxiety. Despite that, here's an honest and detailed review, which I hope will give a better perspective to prospective job seekers. And maybe, hopefully, act as constructive feedback for the company to take note of and improve on, although I doubt so after still seeing the growing negative sentiments and bad reviews even from recently hired staff. Bad Leadership & Management: - Management lacks the necessary equipment to lead the company, both in leadership quality and communication skills. - There is no clear direction with constant change in business focus. - Leaders tend to overestimate the company's ability to handle the number of clients, only focusing on adding new portfolios instead of growing and maintaining existing brands. - Only focus on rapid growth without considering a healthy pace and long-term impact. Extreme Workload: - Lack of resource planning including time vs workload, and the appropriate number of employees needed to cater to the growing business needs. - The number of staff and their experience level doesn't reflect the amount of work and its difficulty. - No action is taken when staff share feedback and request additional resources and workforce. Only empty promises are given claiming that something will be done to address the issue in the near future (which never happens). - The company tends to hire younger executives (cheaper) and give them scopes that more experienced employees should handle. Bad Strategy & Planning Process: - Lack of goal-setting, progression tracking, and postmortem process for every project. - Striving for perfectionism on 'low impact high effort' items yet ironically ending up being unable to perfectly focus on any of 'more critical, high impact' items due to time and resource limitations - Leadership often skips important meetings at the last minute due to overwhelming workloads/schedules. This ends up impacting lower-level employees' productivity as they are unable to receive timely feedback and approval over any plan or decision. - Too much 'flavor of the week' moment and priority change. Some projects are abandoned halfway through completion when a new priority deemed more urgent arises. - Micro-management even towards more senior/managerial level staff who already have a proven number of experiences. Slow Decision-Making: - This brings us to this point. No autonomy is given to senior employees (manager level) in decision-making. Every little thing requires going through the top level which hinders productivity and causes a lot of loss on time-sensitive potentials. - Management also takes a very long time to make their decision, causing delays in progress, disrupting working pace, and overwhelming staff with shortened timeframe. - There are instances where employees had to seek verbal approval to get projects going, received approval in front of other team members, and were given the green light on budget estimation, yet the team was accused of deciding on their own at a later time as the leader was unable to recall her approval (refer point about missing out on meetings and having too many things going on to pay attention to what staffs are saying). Lack of Accountability & Reward: - The lack of management trust in staff prevents accountability and a healthy feedback culture. - No acknowledgment or reward is given for performing employees while harsh 'behind-the-back' criticism is often shared with third parties (other staff) instead of the actual staff involved whenever a crisis/issue arises. - Performing employee achievements are often under-measured and not celebrated. - Leadership claims wins while pushing responsibilities for failures to the employees - Leadership cannot expect perfection or growth without giving adequate training, measurable goals, and an actual constructive review process. - Allow employees to have actual autonomy in their work so they can take accountability if things don't go as well. Toxic HR: - Unprofessional and inexperienced. - HR doesn't fulfill its role of being the middle party between management and employees and is overly biased. - Often makes mistakes in basic HR knowledge and is seen attempting to gaslight staff over employment issues/details. - The offboarding experience was ridiculous (and borderline bullying) and quite honestly, warranted a report to the labor office. Non-Existent Work-Life Balance & Mental Health: - Extremely bad. Employees are often gaslighted, manipulated, and blamed as their opinions and feelings are continuously dismissed. - Lack of concern over employees' well-being. Employees are contacted over weekends, time off, as well as MC and are expected to be responsive immediately. - Management refuses to make an exception to let employees work at home for a short period (despite requests) in an incident when the office was in an unsuitable condition to be working in. Overall, I don't recommend even my worst enemy to come and work here. Former staff (and apparently, even current ones) experience varying levels of burnout (from mild to extreme), loss of motivation, and career-related trauma after working here. The turnover rate is high and most people resigned and left with pretty much negative sentiment.
