First Focus Reviews

- Leadership only communicated over perfunctory teams calls with minimal written instruction. This verbal-only relay continued down the org chart to the front-line workers, to devastating effect on accuracy. - Generally poor objective setting. Instructions were brief, myopic, and lacked strategic context. Middle-managers were often not informed enough to answer rudimentary questions posed by staff, creating frustration. - CEO was a former MS SQL admin who lived only by the numbers he could pull into his dashboards. "Making the numbers green" was routinely the primary goal of an initiative, to the ignorance of real-world impact. - Dashboards had significant blind spots due to imperfect queries or unavailable data. Staff routinely complained that their issues were not addressed if they were not visible on the dashboards, or were only actioned until they were no longer visible on the dashboards instead of properly remediated. - Slow, visibly battered, 8+ year old computers handed out to staff. - Poor app integration. I needed dozens of unique passwords and MFA codes to do my job. Each department used a different system for project task management. None of them talked to each other or the central ERP where my timesheets were kept. All of my overtime claims had to be submitted separately to my actual timesheets and manually referenced because finance also kept an entirely separate system as well. - Speed over success. Internal initiatives were governed by cadence instead of completion. Despite preaching "minimum viable product", management routinely lowered the previously-agreed definition of "viable" at the last minute to meet quarterly deadlines, even if the product wasn't production-ready. - Work from home benefits were continuously reduced, with 3/5 days in-office per an assigned schedule mandatory at the time of my exit. - Maliciously incompetent work management systems. Tickets and projects with under-quoted time budgets were assigned to workers, with workers deemed responsible for "calling it out" to others before corrective action could be taken. Staff who were split between teams were routinely assigned full-time workloads from both teams, pressuring them to work 2x or more jobs. - The CEO was recorded, during several all-hands meetings over multiple years, saying that staff who respond as "unhappy" to the staff happiness survey should just leave.

Executive is afraid of the CEO. So much so, they capitulate every time there is an idea that’s not his. I’ve never engaged an organisation that talks so strongly to their method/culture (have a manual about how much they care), and not actually live it. Long term executive group who have been beaten down to the point that they serve very little function other than a go between the CEO and the staff. CEO approach is about control and demeaning others. So much so, that anyone with a behaviour that’s not his (robotic, impersonal and lacking empathy) is ousted. If you value relationships and connection with the people you work with, then you’re pushed down or gaslighted for being yourself. Was disappointed by the way the exec talked about the staff, as if they weren’t anything but a resource to achieve their next commercial gate. Read, make as much money as possible for themselves. If you’re a professional in the sector, who has the right values, then avoid this company.