A place to learn and leave, not stay and grow. - Graphic Designer Sweetwater Employee Review

For a company as large as Sweetwater, I was incredibly disappointed with my experience working there in the Marketing department. As I was told many times, "Sweetwater is the largest small business you'll ever work for," and that was apparent in the lack of established systems and structure. The biggest issue I found was lack of transparent and open communication — there was no onboarding training, no paths for growth and advancement, the "employee portal" is filled with holes and information is difficult to find, and our team (the only woman-led team in Marketing and a team comprised of primarily women) received little to no support from leadership while at the same time being hyper-scrutinized and micromanaged. Due to the lack of reporting hierarchy and established systems, there were times when people didn't know who their boss was or even what their job description entailed, and that lead to a lot of frustration and confusion. As a Graphic Designer, it was incredibly disheartening to time and time again be told to "do what we've always done," rather than being given the support and mentorship we needed to move Sweetwater into the future. Our team was severely understaffed in regards to creative positions as well as project managers, and we were consistently caught in the middle of middle-management ego trips that left us fearful of losing our jobs. When our team director brought these issues to leadership in order to get any guidance or support, our concerns were ignored. The turnover rate of Marketing employees, especially women, is astronomical. One year into my time at Sweetwater, I was told that Sweetwater is a place for people, especially women, to come, learn all they can, and then take their talents elsewhere. I repeatedly asked what I could do to improve myself as an employee so that I could be considered for advancement opportunities, and even though I was told that I was doing everything right and I was going above and beyond, I was passed over promotions while several male colleagues received promotions and salary increases. When a new senior member was added to our team, most of my projects were reassigned to male teammates with no explanation and I had to take the initiative to ask why, and I never received an answer. I believe members of our team are severely underpaid and we were discouraged from talking about our salaries openly. During the height of the pandemic, several members of our team left because of Sweetwater's unwillingness to allow them to work remotely (because as we were told "Sweetwater is not a 'work from home' company"). Diversity is also a huge issue — in 2021, over 90% of the leadership positions were held by men, the Youtube content on our channel was 98% men, 97% of the inSync blog content was written by white men, and these are just stats I was easily able to look up myself, I'm sure there is more information out there. In my opinion, Sweetwater's Marketing department is staffed with people who have been with the company for too long and don't have the experience, knowledge, or passion to move a $2BN company forward, and they are resistant to new ideas and new people. The overall lack of communication, lack of clear career growth paths, preferential treatment of male peers, the daily stress of being pulled in multiple directions from clients with unrealistic timelines, the unwillingness to create remote work opportunities, HR's unwillingness/inability to take action on employee concerns, and having no faith in progress or additional support is what led me to pursue career opportunities elsewhere.