Cervest It's a startup that feels like a workplace utopia because the culture is unique. At the same time, they communicate internally and behave like they are a corporation. They choose between these two options depending on what they need to justify to people. E.g. Cervest tried to use leading market tools to organise the work, but no people were accountable for using these tools. No one knew how to use these tools, and they gave up after ten months. Now they use the board for drawing, LOL. There are lots of people with a high salary who should be accountable for delivery. In contrast, senior people use the mantra 'we are a startup'; that way, they hide inefficient/ unproductive work environments. Overall “Everything was about image rather than actual progress,” The company’s business plan was non-existent or maybe existed in this format: 'we are amazing'. The company sometimes acts like it is flush with cash. Cervest leased office space which only a few employees knew how to access. Staff are regularly given online free fancy non-work lessons: cooking, drawing, autism, poker, etc. People hardly attended this stuff, but Cervest was happy to burn money. When people began working at Cervest, the spending was far too high. I was surprised when costly IT gear arrived at my home. We also get £500 to spend on the equipment we like, to set up working from home (anything to buy, eg flower pots). Spending needs to be put in hand. The business is carried away , it's a startup, not making money and haemorrhaging money on wages and nice-to-have things. Talent/HR team happily spends lots of money on headhunting by using outside contractors. The company should have focused more on generating revenue and a customer base before scaling up. I would question flying people into London to meet each other (joke). It’s a shame the company was mismanaged so badly. The people are let down time and time again. The company has great people and has not been allowed to shine, owing to terrible leadership constantly trying/failing with random approaches. Work culture Whenever people have a meeting or slack conversation, someone gives feedback to that person or cudos. After some time, people only do updates to avoid feedback and just say how excellent everyone's idea is. , due to that culture, people avoid questioning anything, and all meetings become status update meetings. I'm experienced but have never been in a similar work environment; it's unique. , Senior people read articles on the Internet about what is trendy in Silicon Valley and then apply the same in the Cervest. Still, we all know that being modern does not mean it's working everywhere. Every Friday, they have a meeting to share amazing things eg. a Child started walking, the family got a dog, and people shared knowledge at work. Hardly ever people shared anything about work because there were few achievements. Company got excellent intentions with these meetings, but the majority of people don't care, and senior people insisted on it because some small number of people got a 'need' for this work 'culture' and they drove it hard. The managers would insist that people have to participate in these non-work events, at least happened to me, to show how fantastic culture exists. Whenever senior management says something in the meeting, people use jazzy hands to support it; it's ridiculous seeing 100 people shaking hands with CEO. Operations Senior people are constantly changing procedures and restructuring just to portray that something is happening. Still, these changes have yet to be delivered. There are no senior people with serious business experience., many claim big things in the past, but I have never met anyone I can be motivated to work for them, people without power. e.g.Cervest wanted to start using the OKR process, Company had nearly 50 pages of slides about OKRs setup, internal people had OKR roles which did not have any meaning and no single page on how to create OKR, and we (100 people) spent two months on implementing the OKR process, no one was sure what they need to do. Still, since people are expected to be nice to each other, Noone questioned OKR stuff. People salute whatever management says or team members.; that's what internal culture expects. No single person understood how to produce these OKRs, the person in charge copied the process from some book without previous experience in implementing it, and we spent a silly number of months on these slides. Stuff like that happens frequently. The bottom line is that most senior people don't have experience; everyone nods their heads to approve it, not much trust or confidence in the senior people. The work approach is to get into so much detail when the project starts that the project gets paralysed or becomes very complex. They don't see the big picture and have no experience driving it. Nice to have things The company is burning money on the wrong things, without vision and with no product. Many senior people insist on doing unnecessary 'nice to have' stuff. There are many failed internal projects. They often insist on automation of something people can produce manually quickly. They like buzz words like automation, everyone needs to support these projects. Otherwise, you become an outcast if you question these silly projects. Structure The company's structure works well for a group of senior people who need to have accountability. When things don't work out, these people develop a new process, shift their positions, and invent new roles. Senior people don't talk to each other; very frequently, they don't want to be in the same meeting; they don't support each other. They all want to be individuals on the climate document. That's a primary focus, not supporting each other. Senior people talk about the future and scale-up; some often use corporate language, which most of the workforce needs help understanding. Many decisions are made about scaling up and becoming CORPORATE; senior people are obsessed with behaving as a corporation. No one talks about the client's needs or products. Accountability There are massive HR/talent team people to support a friendly work environment. Many people think it's wrong to burn investors' money, not having products, no clients, insufficient number of client/sales people, and no vision. The company have constant meetings where nothing gets decided , but have lots of business ‘democracy’ to support a 'nice' culture. By the time everyone puts in their input in these meetings, every project gets paralysed by senior people who don't have much experience and constantly internally fighting to get a better career title. Sounds unbelievable, but this happens due to no accountability. HR/Talent HR very often gets the main stage; HR even influences business decisions. In the summer, many people got redundant. It was 'quiet firing/redundancy', and the company kept quiet people found out that a large number of people on LinkedIn the same month changed their status to 'open to hiring’. HR/Talent always talk about how people are friendly to each other, but they hide bad news. While I was there, HR made a big announcement about a new hire who had published a book. I did little digging into this person's profile and found out that person had only one book review on Amazon and four views on their YouTube channel regarding that book. At that time, I knew that Cervest was hiring random people because HR likes them, and fitting into a unique culture is essential. People are keen to deliver, but delivery is not happening.
