Grammatik Reviews

- They didn't care much about the humans working for them, and it was obvious with the throwaway way they were treated. Anyway, there was no guidance, mentorship or time arranged for personal development growth, and people very much regarded as expendable (it was interesting to note the bizarrely callous behavior that could be observed when the founder interacted with any kind of service staff, like waiters, customer service, etc – early on it should have been an alarm that this attitude extends to his own employees). I remember laughing once that we were asked not to talk about one of our colleagues that left the company. Just pretend he didn’t exist! Compared to my experiences since, development of employees was hardly a consideration at Grammatik Agency. - Can’t walk the walk. Early on, we talked about our belief that we were being disruptive in our space. "Other" PR agencies were just conmen who collected a paycheck without contributing, but we were aiming to be a valued, irreplaceable partner to our clients delivering tangible results in measurable ways that traditional PR agencies don't. Well, eventually we stopped talking about that belief as much. Then we stopped talking about it altogether. It coincided with our founder working less, and contributing less while still collecting paychecks ... showing up perhaps once a week eventually. It reminds me a bit of Google removing "Don't be evil" from their values. I wonder why they did that? - No strategy, no leadership, no values. If there was a strategy other than "make more money", I missed it. - You can be offered a salary reduction in a pay review conversation. They can keep a straight face while doing this. It's remarkable. - Was allergic to working from home (as long as you're not the founder who can do whatever it is they do remotely all the time, as much as they want, that's fine, unwritten rules only apply to you, the worker). Especially absurd when all of our clients meet with us remotely (and one of them even worked remotely exclusively, and it was part of our job to promote how progressive and preferable that setup was!). Having worked 100% remote roles since, I know now for certain there was absolutely no reason for any of us to be in the office. It certainly wasn't to create a nice atmosphere, because that was foul. It was to keep tabs on us because they believed we couldn’t work from home (when senior management could be bothered to turn up themselves). - A complete lack of any established processes to do literally anything. Nothing was documented, or explained properly. In spite of this, if you manage to do something wrong (i.e. the founder inexplicably doesn't like your suggestion/use of best judgment/honest attempt to save the business money), you can seriously get in trouble. You were set up to fail: everything was prescriptive and inflexible, but you couldn’t look up how things were “supposed” to be done anywhere. - The founder, the only person allowed to drive the ship when I was there, really didn't want feedback of any kind. I learned that it was better to keep your mouth shut than waste effort mentally exhausting yourself by trying to improve anything if it challenged his way of doing this (i.e.: make it up as you go along). The "why" we were doing most things was absent, which was de-motivating, when the best you can expect if questioned is an angry "because I said so". Again, my subsequent experiences, where employers encourage and welcome feedback from staff, have exposed how poorly such things were managed here, where the goal seemed to be to surround himself with lackeys and yes-men who are unwilling to challenge anything. - A real lack of diversity among employees, or understanding why it's important. It tracks with the trend of not valuing differing opinions. I get that it was a small company, but everyone was white and predominantly male, when I was there. I don’t know if this has changed. - You can get uninvited from trips if you step out of line. - It's nice that the founder likes to hire friends for freelance work, but they're largely incapable and more useful as friendly-seeming spies for informing on existing staff to get them in trouble. They seriously botched client work, and delivered it late more often than not, in my experience. - There was a sense that we were inadequately resourced and also were directionless in leading accounts. We had to try to interpret what clients wanted on the fly and execute it without much scope to make big plays or pay experts for specialist work. It felt unusual we had these clients, some of them very big – and we seemed to get them mostly on our (spurious) credentials that our founder was once the PR assistant at a software company. It felt like a bit of a stretch for us to say we knew what we were doing, and unfortunately our best marketing minds left a short time after I joined, leaving us instead with a driverless train running on pure, misplaced ego. - You can be strongly encouraged to make a life-changing decision, from the very top, like "get a dog, I'd love an office dog!", only to be told not to bring your (perfectly good and well-behaved) pet to the office. After adoption, when it’s too late. With no reason given. When it's a puppy that needs training and constant company. There wasn't any reasonable dialogue about circumstances or trying to come to an amicable solution with compromise, it was just "no, I changed my mind, don't bring the dog in and also don't work from home". It felt cruel, and designed to push me out, as I had lost favour. - Working late, sometimes very late, is no big thing. Often encouraged. Poor work-life balance as a result, as you're also expected to more or less be on call after hours, too. - I think that working here made me physically ill over time. I didn't think stress and anxiety could do that, but it seemed to happen to me, and resulted in a number of doctor visits.