Related to the culture of celebration at Workshop, this at times seemed very excessive. To check myself a bit before continuing, this could absolutely be me projecting the drastic difference in company culture that I had come from where props or key wins were celebrated maybe once a month for one person or team for truly exceptional work. At Workshop, again this is a pro and a con in my opinion, almost everything was celebrated equally, every week, if not multiple times a week. While this can be exciting for younger employees fresh out of college looking for recognition amongst their peers, there were many, many times where teammates pulled me aside and expressed frustration at the fact that their hard work or achievements were seen as equal to what many would consider "just doing your job" being celebrated. To put it plainly, it seemed that the recognition of truly exceptional work lost the uniqueness of its acknowledgment given the very high frequency of celebration of work in general.
While this is actively being worked on at Workshop and is a work in progress, there was not an open or encouraged culture of feedback. This is not true for all employees, but many employees were overtly offput by any critical feedback shared. To check myself again, I absolutely could have worked on having a better delivery and tone in sharing feedback with my peers, but it was clear that I was one of the first, if not only, AEs consistently giving feedback to the BDR team. I quickly realized that this was not the company norm. I hope this has since changed and that there is an open culture of critical feedback at all levels. I personally believe it only makes people better at their jobs. While it wasn't "fun" having the VP of Sales rip my calls to shreds, she absolutely made me a better sales rep in doing so. No one is perfect and everyone has room for improvement.
The last thing I want to share is that it didn't feel like the areas of improvement for the BDR team were addressed quickly and I believe that had to do with the fact that the impacts of the meeting quality weren't immediately felt. When I had brought this up numerous times last summer and fall, I shared that my biggest worries weren't going to be the effects on 2025's performance, but that it would be felt in the pipeline and closed revenue 6ish months later (early to mid 2026) given the length of our sales cycle, at which point it would then take an equal amount of time to feel the benefits of better meeting qualification (mid 2026). It just felt like it wasn't addressed seriously because of the fact that it wouldn't be impacting business performance in the near term.
