A heartless company that treats you like a machine and is void of empathy - Anonymous employee CTL Communications Employee Review

The longer I stayed at CTL, the more issues I started to discover. One major issue was that there was basically zero care for employees' well-being. Just profit over people.

 As it was completely remote, it could start to become quite an isolating job and there was never really any desire for the creative team to try and meet up and work together. This made working there feel very disconnected. There were a lot of expectations on the individual and a lot of figuring things out yourself. CTL definitely lacks the HR staff who should be the ones focusing more on the well-being of the employees and not concentrating on just endlessly sending out work, which at points could be overwhelming and was badly organised.
 All of this combined started to affect my mental health at points, but there was very little effort for anyone to even do the bare minimum of checking in to see how everyone was getting on. The projects that came in, more often than not, had been worked on by another designer but you’d still be asked to suddenly jump in on it right at the last minute and also be expected to know everything about the project with very little direction and never a coherent brief. There was next to no ownership on a project, just a haphazard approach to pump out as much work as you could. Also, add the fact that projects were always marked as ‘URGENT!’ (which is a really poor use of language) you were pretty much expected to drop everything to suddenly work on it. This way of working is completely counter-productive and it really puts a lot of expectation on a small design team. The lines of this job started to blur and infiltrate my personal life at points. There was a WhatsApp group that just had the creative team in it and was set up as more of a way to just informally chat about things that were not work-related. At points, HR would ask if anyone was able to suddenly work on a project that was out of the scheduled work hours. This happened a handful of times which I found very unprofessional. Towards the end of my time at CTL, I started to become unmotivated as it clearly seemed that receiving negative feedback about projects, with no attempt at it being constructive, seemed to be the norm. There was no real effort to try and understand why a member of staff was underperforming. It just seemed easier saying “Yeah, I’ve got some more negative comments to give you” with no constructive feedback and then just hoping that the employee would be miraculously motivated to work again. Some people’s tones in their emails could come across as rude and passive aggressive and it started to get to the point where it felt like we weren’t even talking to each other like humans and that some people would rather not directly talk about a project that could've been improved and preferred to essentially talk behind your back. What overshadows all of this is how I was let go. It was very sudden and was in a Teams meeting with the head of HR and my manager (who said nothing). I asked what feedback I could receive, that could possibly help me in the future but neither wanted to reply and somewhat dismissed me asking. Straight after, my laptop started to erase itself, turned off and then locked itself. I then went to leave the WhatsApp group but I already had been removed. This whole experience was incredibly cold and impersonal. It was like I hadn’t existed. Just erased and replaced. You’d think that the ‘C’ in CTL stood for ‘Cold’ or ‘Callous’ but the fact it stands for the owner's name shows the level of egotism that drives this business.