Pretty messed up culture - Anonymous employee InvestIN Employee Review

There are some pretty toxic/unsettling things about this company that people should know if they’re considering working here. The most obvious is the staff turnover. Almost 50 people left this company in an 18 month period. That’s a NINETY percent turnover. Whatever people say about high turnover being normal in a start up environment, that is not normal (I looked it up, and the average employee turnover for a start up is 25%). Then, there’s how many of those people were fired. This company has some of the most messed up hiring/firing policies I’ve ever seen - it is SO cutthroat. If management decide they don’t like you, you basically don’t stand a chance. Multiple people were fired without warning over the smallest stuff, and in a really brutal way. Like, called into a meeting with no warning, told they no longer had a job and escorted from the premises like some sort of criminal. Then, the remaining staff are told that that person ‘no longer works here’ with no other details OR are lied to, and told their decision to leave was a ‘mutual’ decision OR are told that, as they’re sure we’ll understand, they had to be let go ‘for the good of the business’. What an insanely misjudged thing to say to an employee. And a surefire way to make people feel a) totally insecure in their job and b) like the company they work for sees people as completely expendable. This was people’s livelihoods and wellbeing at stake and it felt like there was a total lack of empathy for that. The second thing is salary. The salaries are low here for the amount of work you’re expected to do, particularly for the programme management team, who are responsible for designing and running the programmes that make the company money. When this was raised by various employees, we were told in a company-wide meeting that Investin offers amazing experience and responsibility to people at the beginning of their career that we would struggle to find anywhere else. This may be true, but I don’t really see how said experience is supposed to pay rent. Though some effort seemed to be made to address this, it mostly just resulted in certain people being paid way more than others to do exactly the same job (there were even some cases where new people were hired on higher salaries and older employees were expected to manage them, despite making less). Don’t really understand the thinking behind this - it caused a LOT of unrest when people found out what their colleagues were earning. And when they rose concerns with management about how unfair it was, they were told it was gross misconduct/a fireable offence to discuss salary. This is a lie. And, I think, really takes advantage of young employees, many of whom are recent grads, not knowing their rights in the workplace. In terms of the everyday reality of working here, it can be fun/stimulating/varied depending what you’re working on, but there aren’t many real processes in place in certain teams and everything tends to be done on the fly, which can make the day-to-day feel frustrating and unnecessarily stressful. The 2 MDs are constantly bringing in new initiatives or starting new projects (way beyond what the staff have capacity to handle) and then erratically changing their mind and axing them further down the line when they realise we don’t have the time/resources to pull them off. This means you can put hours, weeks or even months of work into a project before being told it’s not happening anymore. Very frustrating. There’s also an immense sense of paranoia and secrecy at odds with the kind of company this is, often resulting in some pretty unscrupulous business practices. When one senior employee handed their notice in, the rest of their team was called into head office and told they had to commit to staying for the busy summer period or else hand in their notice now. Not even really sure this is legal. When another was offered a promotion/pay rise, they were told that if they accepted it they had to commit to staying for a year, and that if they left within that time then the ‘bad PR’ of that decision would follow them through their career. I also remember reading a pretty scathing (and accurate) review on here several months ago that now seems to have disappeared… would not put it past management to have found a way to have it removed. Pretty crazy way to run a company. And to be clear, almost all of the reviews here are from interns or university students who work here over the summer period when the programmes are on. They’re only here for a short time and don’t really get to experience in depth how this company is run.