Soul Destroying - Head of Marketing THG Employee Review

Incredibly toxic overall - micromanagement at all levels with SLT sat all day making decisions that should be handled by people 3 levels below them. Far too many people all trying to wade in on decision making meaning a lot of things go around in circles and never actually come to fruition. Extreme blame culture and passive aggressiveness - I have never been spoken to in any company the way I was at THG, everyone below director level is spoken to like a child and treated as if they are just starting their career; you can have a decade of experience and will not be trusted to make the simplest decisions or listened to at all. People are humiliated by SLT on a daily basis, and it is all standard practice. Output expectation is about 3x what is realistic for the actual workforce - everyone burnt out, unable to actually deliver everything, no time to prioritise or even review workload because you will constantly be spinning a million plates. I spent two years working evenings, weekends (unpaid) and probably an average of 60 hours a week and still didn’t have enough time to do so many things. New hires will most likely leave within 6 months - over my two years at THG I never had a full team and had to hire for an entire new team twice. I hired 5 team managers in 2 years, 4 of whom didn’t last longer than 2 months each due to micromanagement and rudeness from other internal teams who gave them no chance to find their feet and also due to the SLT they were exposed to. I had several members of the team pushed out of the business whilst in their probation for quick cost cutting, and the business attempted to frame me as the decision maker in this process which I had to refuse to prevent any legal repercussions. Extreme favouritism. Specific employees who have been at THG a long time will be favoured without even trying to hide it - and they all succeed at THG because they adopt the passive aggressive, micromanagement, “loudest person in the room” persona. The irony is all of these people have zero leadership or collaboration skills, despite having a lot of knowledge on the products and trade mechanics. Entire teams can complain about them repeatedly and the business will always turn around and blame the team instead. Zero focus on processes or workflow because they are so focused on daily numbers. The company is huge and yet doesn’t even have a basic project management tool. Team structures are messy, sign off processes are absolutely insane if they even exist, and no one ever has any idea how to actually make things happen because there is no clarity on any of this. They don’t even have a performance review tool - it is just scores submitted on an excel sheet sent to HR, with no one able to see this or access it. And all this because the business likely sees it as an “empty cost” with no ROI. Because of the culture and the issues over the last couple of years, this has been magnified with everyone ready to throw each other under the bus at every turn. Directors will happily throw entire teams under the bus just to avoid being pushed out, and it happens every single day. Blame, blame, blame. It is a school playground rather than a professional workspace. Eventually, I mentally clocked out completely because my mental health declined to the point at this company where I couldn’t even enjoy my personal life or find energy to do anything except try and physically and mentally recover whenever I could. I have worked in fast paced international businesses - I can handle pressure. The only way to succeed at this company is to make it your entire identity and sacrifice a huge amount of your personal life for it - no thanks. Executive leadership all have millions in shares and expect people on £30k salaries that don’t even get annual bonuses to show commitment by staying late and working overtime constantly - and seem confused that they won’t. The CEO often speaks about the company comparing it to tech giants like Google and how employees should be honoured to work at THG. The company makes money yes, but that is it. Everything else is a complete mess at every level with absolutely zero company benefits, and this is really starting to show in its numbers. Revenue declining, waves of redundancies, more and more quitting all the time - they are frantically trying to sell off divisions and reverse the flow but it is far too late at this point. It is really startling how disconnected leadership are from the actual core issues of the business. Overall, I only stayed as long as I did because of tough job market conditions - I cannot express how relieved I am to finally be out of there and to reclaim my life.