Passive Aggressive and Problematic - Employee TopRank Marketing Employee Review

TopRank is an agency that is extremely out of touch with the industry and has lost its way. They have not met revenue goals for over a year, since they’re bleeding clients and doing careless, error-laden work for the few clients they have left. Not bringing in revenue has shifted the culture from a flexible, laidback remote team to a tense, stressful, overly demanding, and toxic working environment. Quarterly employee surveys are used to ferret out the malcontents, with managers then instructed to “talk to so and so about their responses” so they can tell employees what they’re feeling is unwarranted. Direct feedback is avoided and backchannel communications abound as people go over each others’ heads to complain about someone. Tension between creatives and account services is on a constant boil, with leaders being quick to point fingers instead of working to de-escalate friction between team members. Worse yet is that TopRank’s leadership do not possess the skills or business acumen to critique strategic initiatives, so they nitpick tactics. This is also a passive aggressive way they assert dominance over team members they just don’t like. As someone who worked very hard on everything I had a hand in creating, this persistent drip, drip, drip of petty criticism was demoralizing. It wreaked havoc on my mental health, leaving me insecure, discouraged, paranoid, and very depressed. The persistent passive aggression is poisoning whatever culture is left at TopRank. Instead of putting time and money into improving their services, upskilling their teams, and adequately training managers to be effective leaders, TopRank would rather stick to what they’ve done for 20+ years. That’s why they keep beating the drum of offering long-form content for SEO and “B2B influencers”, though they have yet to update approaches to either. Unless you count raising prices as an update. Pricing keeps going up since TopRank isn’t making enough revenue. Rates for services are shocking given the work is so poorly led and unoriginal— and that’s IF they even know how to do what they promise clients. Leaders fabricated services offered by TopRank for SOWs and RFPs, pulling packages and pricing out of thin air. What has formed in the absence of actual skills is a glaring deficit of competitive knowledge about the industry and its high standards. Unfortunately (or fortunately, in this case) there’s a reckoning for agencies that is happening. Sloppy, typo-laden, late work will not cut it anymore. The clients know it too, which is why one by one, they’re dropping like flies. This agency’s work is mediocre at best, and a gigantic waste of client marketing dollars at worst.