Talented coworkers but leadership struggles to connect
Pros
+ Tight-knit working environment among employees. There's a real sense that you're all in it together. + I cannot emphasize enough how talented some of the people I worked with are. Some of the most amazingly skilled people I've ever met work here. + Ohanafy's rapid-fire pace offers a great deal of opportunity for personal and professional growth. I'm immensely proud of how my skillset grew over the years I worked there, and a great deal of that growth is due to how I was thrown into new projects I would never have had the chance to work on outside of the company.
Cons
- Leadership team isolates themselves from the rest of the company, much to their detriment. Taken to its most extreme form when the CEO decided to sequester himself in the back of the office and rarely interacted with anyone outside of the leadership team. - Lots of emphasis on Ohanafy being a "family," but with little to show for it. A forced emphasis on team bonding events and "startup culture" which no one really believed in. - The leadership team worshipped all elements of startup life, but failed to make the case as to why employees should care about the product and company as much as they did. While they all had shares in the company - and thus an incentive to to drive growth - the average employee has no real stake in Ohanafy outside of wanting to keep their job. Late nights, long shifts, and weekend work might have made sense if we'd had a real stake in the company's success, but leadership never seemed to care. While there were plans in place for everyone to eventually buy shares of the company at a set price, I know of no one who lasted long enough at Ohanafy to claim them. - High employee turnover/burnout rate: Again, it was rare for anyone outside of the leadership team and some of the initial/essential employees to stay on for some time. And when someone was inevitably fired, leadership refused to give us the details. Instead, they'd just say that the former employee failed to meet standards -- that they weren't "startup material." But a lot of the time an individual was let go because they weren't "on message," or failed to display the right attitude. If the company was sincere about seeing us as "family," then they should have made more of an effort at being open when it came to people leaving the company. - Lack of Communication: On the whole, Ohanafy fails when it comes to internal communication -- especially when it comes to communication between leadership and employees. At times communication could be rude, or jarringly inept. This was exacerbated by the lack of an independent HR department. - Constantly Switching Gears: Ohanafy struggles to define itself and what it does. Initially borne from the idea of creating an all-in-one salesforce platform dedicated to craft breweries, it has since mutated into a company which flails in a million different directions, reaching for something which will provide it the success it needs to make a name for itself. First we shifted to distilleries, then on to the big beverage companies, then we decided to shift to food and produce wholesale, and finally jumped on the AI bandwagon. As it stands, Ohanafy is a chimera — an amalgamation of different ideas and dreams forced to cohabit in a single corporate entity, with the end result being that nothing is actually achieved.