-- EDIT TO ADD: The leadership of iFOCUS seems to spend more time responding to and disagreeing with negative reviews than they do finding genuine solutions to the loss of revenue and clients. I am not surprised they would outright deny the fact that members of leadership have raised their voice in the office, but that does not change reality. --
Before anything else, the CMO raises her voice at employees. It's completely unacceptable and unprofessional behavior in a work environment. The only reason to ever raise your voice while addressing an employee is to stop them from hurting themselves or others, not because they're struggling to keep up with unrealistic demands that you put upon them. This toxic environment is growing because business has been steadily declining for years. The company is constantly in a state of chaos to make up the difference, instead of diagnosing where the problem lies (upper-level management, mostly). Mid-level managers are piled high with work that keeps them from being able to manage, which leads to an awkward overreach of C-level positions both in client and employee interactions. Clients were often given unrealistic terms to win them over without leadership knowing whether the employees could actually do the work within the given timeframes. Tragically, they are leaning more and more on generative AI to perform many aspects of the work.
This place is definitely personality-first 90% of the time, where the friendly and likable folks were highly favored over the ones who quietly completed their work, as evidenced by a recent increase in expected in-office days for every employee. In one department, the lowest paid employee who also had the heaviest workload was laid off in favor of keeping a more personable employee who accomplished much less work for higher pay, so it was clearly not motivated by actual business interests.
In one year, seven people either quit, were laid off, or were fired (including one of the most competent workers and managers I've ever worked with). I believe leadership changed about 3.5 years ago and it seems the consequences of that change are coming home to roost. Most of their positive reviews on Google are from clients who are no longer with the company and other Glassdoor reviews seem pretty accurate in terms of how management and general culture has been over the last several years. While they claim to make decisions thoughtfully with a focus on long-term growth and accountability, there's little evidence to support that. Personnel decisions are sometimes made without input from the employee's actual supervisors and morale has been dropping faster than revenue because no one knows when their time will come.
