Where to begin? To echo the many other negative reviews, employee and team happiness seems to be directly linked to how close the CEO is working with your department. I.E, if he starts to micromanage your department, you and your coworkers will quickly have a VERY poor work environment. This seemed to happen to each department once every several months, and led to undue pressure on the managers and even greater undue pressure on the employees. Unorthodox and excessive involvement as a CEO made it sometimes IMPOSSIBLE to accomplish anything within a department, leading to a high stress environment full of pointless arguing, unnecessary revisions of projects, and sometimes complete failure for given initiatives.
This poor approach to leadership from the CEO seems to have spread to other leadership positions too, as many of the managers at SurveyGizmo seemed to function less as a true leader willing to work with their team towards meeting goals TOGETHER, and more as a detached superior delegating all of the work and pressure to the employees under them. Again, this made for a very stressful and toxic work environment within the company, and job functions and goals suffered as a result.
Poor hires for management positions were also rampant in 2017, leading to immense mis-hires, high turnover rates, and employee dissatisfaction on many of the teams. Poor leadership planning and unreasonable goals often led to a failure to meet initiatives and number goals on the sales and marketing teams specifically, and leadership held ZERO, I repeat ZERO, accountably for these failures. Instead, the employees were left to be reprimanded for not making these goals and made to feel as if their work was deficient, as opposed to poor, unreasonable planning from leadership. Management rarely seemed receptive to complaints about this poor leadership, often making it difficult for employees to voice their concerns or unhappiness.
Finally, yes, many employees were strongly encouraged to leave a five star review for the company on Glassdoor. Many of the perfect reviews you will find around fall 2016 were a result of this encouragement, and not an unbiased look at the company. The reality of SurveyGizmo is much more dysfunctional, stressful, and often toxic, unquestionably a product of poor leadership and planning.
