1. There's no real management here. The people who are in "upper management" either founded the company or have been there 10+ years, they aren't trained in what it means to manage a team. Every meeting (whether it's upper management only or with teams) is unproductive and usually accompanied by screaming, finger pointing, scolding... They think shouting is the way to motivate/inspire people. (And: The CEO and his brother, who’s the founder and President, don’t see eye to eye all the time. So you’ll get one of them saying one thing to you, but then get in trouble for doing it by the other.)
2. Their HR department is ineffective, but super nice. They know about problems within the company – the abrasive managers, conflicts between departments – but don’t do anything to remedy it. A big part of the problem is that the owners of the company allow their managers to treat each other and their employees with such disrespect that it becomes accepted by everyone, even HR.
3. The company is unwilling to adapt to changing times. They started a marketing department within the last two years informally, and built and fired half the department within 2016. They consider marketing to be “the hard sell,” and don’t listen to anything the marketing department suggested. Besides marketing, their website is not mobile-friendly, looks horrendous, and has been “in the works” for years. They don’t market-test anything, and instead go off of personal preference of the upper management. (If your customer doesn’t like something, it doesn’t matter if everyone at your company does.) They’re stuck in the past in every sense of the term.
4. They forcibly push their internal line of toys and collectibles (Bif Bang Pow) for employees to market/sell, but don’t do market-testing on the products before they make them and then hound employees as to why they haven’t “tried hard enough” to sell them.
5. I’ve said this a bit previously, but just to highlight how hostile this work environment is: There were multiple conflicts between my department and another department. Mediations didn’t work, it was all finger pointing, they would draft documents about everything we did wrong, call to scream at us on the phone, CC all upper management on emails complaining about us, try to get us fired… it was miserable. I would get so anxious before having to return to work on Monday that I’d get knots in my stomach and be unable to eat. I didn’t care about conflict or even losing my job, I was just miserable at having to deal with dozens of emails from people who would rather blame me for something they didn’t want to do themselves. If something went right, it was all because of them and their team was amazing; if something went wrong, it was my fault or my department’s fault and we were idiots.
6. The moral of the company employees is dismal.
*I left for a job with significantly less pay.
