from riches to rags: the Envoy story - Operations Envoy Employee Review

Leadership boasts of our amazing diversity, but its more performative than actual, especially in VP / C-Level. Most depts have a point where you can advance no further, so the best folks burn out and leave, including extroardinary engineers. Due to eternally running on a skeleton crew in engineering, competitors can build, test, and release features 3x faster. - the CEO, though well-intentioned, should have passed the torch 5 years ago to someone more business-savvy. IPO is off the table. But the CEO's greatest weakness is hiring executives, which I will highlight below: All seasoned employees would tell you the ship has been slowly capsizing for years, but the culture of wonderful people keeps us around. However, the recent Executive that was hired has led to the swiftest migration of talent that I have ever seen. This executive is openly misogynistic around the office, talks and acts as if Envoy is a boys club from the 90s (think Wolf of Wall St.), flirts with the women, and berates the men. Most notably, this executive has: 1. Ran out 2 of the longest tenured sales leaders, and a slew of tenured, prominent AEs. We have lost 25+ total years of Envoy experience amongst the amazing VPs / Managers / AEs that just chose to leave in the past month. 2. Forced Managers to choose between: maintaining their integrity, or adopting an aggressive & demeaning leadership style to align with the new executive’s style. Most managers sadly chose the latter one. 3. Taken control of non-sales departments, such as firing nearly the entire marketing team if the executive didn’t like or care for them 4. Created an environment where salespeople feel demoralized and set up to fail. You can see it on the faces of the AEs every day. SMB AEs are treated the worst of all. The company is pushing to attract larger enterprise customers, yet many core products are inundated with bugs, making this shift untenable. They want to market & sell solutions that simply don’t work as advertised, and customers observe this during free trials. A wide-scale departure of wonderful employees has occurred and is occurring. Instead of addressing this head-on, the company-wide meeting promoted a slide deck about being triggered at work, and put us through a series of deep breathing exercises to de-trigger. Extremely tone deaf.