Where does one begin???
Let's start from the surface level and make our way down.
The office: I don't know if I would even call it an office. It's more of a warehouse with a few rooms attached. There are no meeting rooms except for an enormous boardroom that does not have privacy panels, so everyone has to take meetings at their desk and sometimes on loud speaker because it would involve a whole group of internal staff. Extremely distracting and unprofessional. This also means it's not possible to have a private conversation unless the boardroom is free or you go outside lol.
The technology infrastructure: It basically doesn't exist. Nearly everyone is given a gigantic computer to use, which means, it is impossible to take your computer with you and have a private meeting even if there were proper meeting rooms. The computers are heavy and makes blended wfh and office arrangement extremely cumbersome and just not feasible. Furthermore, only the free Zoom plan was used, which meant meetings could not go for further than 40min without restarting; meaning no funding was invested into making wfh easier.
Workflow: Some of the teams don’t know how to collaborate and ensure the workflow is smooth. When in lockdown, there were no daily meetings (initially) to run through the day’s tasks, which meant, miscommunication and confusion was prevalent. The marketing department seemed to think they were running the show instead of working collaboratively with other teams. Starting to see a pattern?
Training: There was none apart from a 1 day handover prior to starting. No time was allocated to watch training modules, instead, they were expected to be “watched in our own time”.
Staff members: Most were not courteous and would not introduce themselves despite the fact I was new to the team. In general, it was not a welcoming environment. The feeling of being ignored was definitely apparent.
Management: Line manager did not touch base until one week after start date. And no one-on-one’s were ever set up. Upper management and HR did not touch base at the end of week 1 despite stating they would. No proper introductions were made to the team. HR has absolute no clue what they’re doing or how to even speak professionally. This was evident right from the initial conversation, where they called to ask if I was still interested in the job and I said potentially, to which they responded with “what do you mean potentially?” in an annoyed and mocking tone.
Upper management will reprimand you by calling you out of the blue or request to see you in the boardroom and tear you apart for the most minor “error” and saying they want their staff to "sink before they can swim", this was after being there for one month, mind you. Other staff members seem to conspire with upper management instead of providing support; they would proceed to demean and undermine you and treat you like a child by continuously admonishing you and asserting their authority. I shudder writing this now.
I could go on but I think the picture is pretty clear.