Pros
WFH is cool, I guess.
Cons
If you value any of these things: -work-life balance -cool creative work -competent leadership -meaningful career growth opportunities that are based on merit and not because you are a long time friend of someone that is a senior leader -upper level employees that won’t act inappropriately at company functions -your mental health then this is not the place for you. -The Creative Department Is Run Atrociously Have you ever been on a sports team coached by someone who has never played the sport before? Like a dad who just randomly volunteered for the role because they think being a fan of the sport is the same thing as actually coaching people to play that sport? And instead of actually giving you real instruction, they just yell at you and tell you that you are doing things wrong to hide the fact that they have no idea what they are talking about? Well, I’d say the experience working at this agency is pretty similar. You can’t bring up any valid concerns. If you do, you are seen as a “problem” and you will be gaslit by senior leadership into being told that it isn’t a problem. There’s also a lot of finger pointing and no one to take any real responsibility among the senior leadership team, which results in nothing ever really getting fixed. Burnout is a serious problem, and multiple people left without anything lined up because of it. Off the top of my head I can think of around 6-7 senior level people (several of them being director level) who left within the last 3 years because of burnout and lack of respect for mental health. When people try to bring up the issue of burnout, people are either 1) gaslit and told that it isn’t a problem 2) given a survey to collect thoughts which ultimately doesn’t lead to anything or 3) given a $20 gift card, hoping that the problem goes away. That leads into another problem. Lack of career growth. As a creative, it feels like you are in a sweat shop. Constantly churning out content with no real direction and goal in sight. Employees are not set up to succeed with the amount of work that they are given. People are being let go but the amount of work stays exactly the same, which means whoever is left has to pick up the rest of the work with no real additional help in sight. The way teams are structured is a mess. During my time I had 4 or 5 different managers, and I know that I am not the only person that has had that experience. There was also a time where I didn’t have a manager for around 6 months or so, so there was really no one to truly advocate for me and my workload (this is something that other people have experienced as well). There is a lot of favoritism at this agency. The head of the creative department hired a bunch of their friends to work at the agency (coworkers by chance, friends by choice according to one of their IG posts) so senior leadership is basically a clique. Good luck trying to make a complaint about one of their friends. You will not be successful in actually changing anything. (Example: One of the CCO’s friends was an ACD for one of the accounts that I was working on, along with another ACD that was hired to run our account. The ACD that wasn’t the CCO’s friend was clearly struggling, trying to juggle all of the responsibilities of the account, while the CCO’s friend was MIA and nowhere to be seen. If you sent them a message, they just wouldn’t respond. They just wouldn’t show up to meetings. There were murmurs that they had another job and that they were just collecting checks from this job. In the end, the CCO’s friend was silently moved to another account while the other ACD was fired. I can’t say with certainty that my hunch is exactly what happened, but there have been too many cases that fit the "favoritism" angle for things like this not to be true. I mean, the agency even secretly hired the CCO’s spouse for work. I had no idea Movement was a friends and family business.) The favoritism also comes through with PTO approvals. It seems like some employees can take as much PTO as they want and allow others to just pick up their work, while some lower level employees have a difficult time getting even a single day of PTO approved. Again, I’m not saying that my thoughts are correct, but when you see the people who seemingly get to take PTO whenever they want, and the people that have to move mountains to get one day approved, it is very interesting. The CCO also had a birthday party inviting their inner circle of senior leaders from the creative team, and while that is not illegal, it reemphasizes the favoritism within the agency and shows how career development and gaining opportunities isn’t about who can do it the best, it’s about who is friends with this person and kisses up the most. The agency doesn’t really prepare you for the next steps in your career. They just throw you into scenarios and expect you to figure it out, which I guess makes sense because the senior leaders aren’t that good at their jobs themselves, so how could they accurately help you grow into being a good leader yourself? This agency talks a lot about growth tracks and OKRs but don’t actually give you the tools to be good at your job. Oh, and lastly, a certain someone really doesn’t know how to keep their hands to themselves at company events after having some drinks. Very, very inappropriate behavior. -It’s All About Making Things Look Nice, Instead of Actually Making Them Nice It’s all about “keeping things positive” and pretending that everything is totally fine at this agency. If people try and suggest any actual solutions, they are never actually received well. Say, for example, an employee suggests that we do a post mortem to discuss issues on an account and to prevent them from happening in the future. The post mortem either a) doesn’t ever happen to keep a “positive vibe” for the team, or b) a survey is sent out and no real solution ever really materializes from that survey. This agency loves to do a lot of random things (at one point they announced that they would change the name of the DEI committee to *drumroll please* “Inclusion Champions”…) to show that they are “cool” for lack of a better word, but its really all for show. -Account Management is a MESS at this agency. This agency has a huge problem with creating scopes and sticking to them. Account Managers at this agency for some reason cannot say “No” to the clients when they ask us to do more than what was originally written in the scope, leading to burnout, unhappiness, and unhealthy relationships with the client. In addition, accounts were approving creative work and production timelines with no real consultation from the creative team, leading to stressful timelines and unrealistic work demands. No amount of “I know the clients are crazy, but…” is going to make people feel better when the people communicating with the clients and our internal team are doing a terrible job at doing so. -This agency loves to waste money and time on consultants and ventures that never seem to do anything. During my time, the agency invested/took time to do the following: -a “4th office location” in the Metaverse, which to my knowledge, has not really been used since the “opening party” we had for it. We were also told that the metaverse office was expensive because we were occupying “prime real estate”. Whatever that means. -An “AI expert” who was very clearly, not an expert. This person had three different stints at our agency, and was extremely unhelpful every time they were here. The person claimed in their own words that they were not a professional, and that they were someone who became “obsessed with AI for around 6 months or so after no having a job for so long”. This person also never really had a set role at the agency. They just went around basically going up to people saying “May I offer you an egg in this trying time?” Any “tool” they tried to create for us didn’t work. Any idea they tried to pitch derailed the task at hand. No real role, no real help, no real solutions given, yet this person was put at an SVP level and for some reason kept being brought back despite not actually contributing any substantial results towards the agency. Any time any moral or environmental concerns about AI were brought up, they were brushed aside and always led to a tangent about how they believed AI was magic and that they couldn’t believe that something like this was possible. Again, not helpful at all. If you really wanted to hire an expert, why not hire someone with actual, professional experience? Someone who actually knows what they are talking about? Why not identify exactly what we need, and see what experts out there can address that exact need? -Various cultural consultants. It’s hard to describe exactly what people do, but I’d say some of them could easily fit into the description of “scammer”. One person the agency hired did some sessions about teamwork and whatnot, and basically sat there and showed us a couple of youtube videos and gave us some generic remarks about what it means to be a good teammate. The agency also hired a random person to do some sort of “mind training/glow up” session with us, and it was a very unprofessional presentation. This person said that she cured her cancer with “healthy foods like broccoli” and claimed that Mexican food is very unhealthy and would lead to an unhealthy lifestyle. She also showed us some sort of chart that talked about how we can heal different parts of ourselves with different vibrations. Even after numerous complaints were placed with HR, they still went ahead and did another session. It’s always something flashy with no substance. It just feels very tone deaf to be doing all of these things while people are overworked and underpaid at the agency. People want to be paid for their work. We do not want the work equivalent of a pizza party to soothe our frustrations with working conditions. This agency at the beginning felt like a good place striving to do fun social work. Overtime, it slowly turned into a social media sweatshop where people are overworked, undervalued, and under appreciated. A place where toxic behavior and blind loyalty is rewarded over actual hard work. If you want to create actual good work, please go somewhere else. You will not be happy here. This place will grind you to the bone and act like it’s a luxury that you’d even get the opportunity to be run into the ground like this. The pay, the leadership, the opportunities, it’s all terrible. Considering all the people that have left the agency over the past several years, it’s clear that it’s not just me that feels this way.