Pros
- If you look at reviews from 3-4 years ago, you’ll notice that Adswerve was once a special place, where people cared about taking great care of clients and each other. If you look at recent reviews (minus the fake reviews that provide no details about why or how things are “great”) you’ll notice a serious shift in sentiment. As the business took a turn in 2021 and toxic leaders were promoted higher into the organization, the culture (and performance of the business) took a hard right turn. Then the interdepartmental finger-pointing began. Department heads seem to despise each other. You can really tell a lot about the character of your leaders by how they treat each other when things aren’t going well. So I guess a “pro” is that Adswerve used to be special and full of great people but with the mass exodus over the past few years, there’s very few good folks left. - WFH is nice.
Cons
Ineffective, Toxic leaders: - Year after year the Employee Engagement Surveys tell the story here. Single digit leadership approval rates (yes, single digits, like out of 100) are returned and of course no changes are made. It must be everyone else’s fault and the business’s poor performance must be the fault of junior employees. It simply couldn’t be leadership. - If you decide to work here you can expect a poorly thought out and terribly executed reorg every 6 months as has been the trend for the past 6 years. A symptom of the continued lack of vision. Don’t expect a new job description or an explanation of what expectations are for your new role. Instead, expect a “get aligned or get fired” approach to leadership. Feedback is not welcomed here. - The “weaponization of feedback” (direct quote) is a theme that stands out for the last couple of years in the employee engagement survey. Leadership is only looking out for themselves and will be the first to scapegoat junior employees for the performance of the business instead of taking ownership for their impact. Most employees go to such great lengths to pass their anonymous feedback through AI just to ensure that they can't be identified for fear of retribution. To leadership, any feedback that is provided is a demonstration of that employee’s “lack of alignment” and they should expect to see that reflected in their end of year review. - Leadership goes into promotion and people planning conversations with the goal of feeling like they “won the negotiation”. Their egos are so massive, they MUST feel like they won. There’s no effort to demonstrate care for their employees, instead they should “just be happy that they have a job” (direct quote) - something I’m sure you’ve heard all great leaders say (eye-roll). Extremely Political Environment, driven by EVERYONE being worried about keeping their job: - Leadership constantly says that legacy employees are resistant to change but what these loyal employees are resistant to is bad leadership and ill informed business decisions where feedback is weaponized. It’s not hard to see if your ego isn’t in the way. - Leadership is so allergic to feedback that they gaslight you by placing the blame back on the employees, positioned as “you are the problem” and “you’re resistant to change”. After a while, you start to believe them. Gradually, your job becomes stroking the egos of sensitive white people as they make bad decisions and then take no ownership of the negative business and cultural impacts. - Double standards and blatant favoritism are pervasive. Toxic leaders are described as “misunderstood” while anyone providing feedback is blacklisted and flagged as not open to change and thus, unpromotable and eventually fireable. Favoritism rears its ugly head again and again while employees that are responsible for growing the same (failing) business unit receive blatantly different treatment (one is promoted while the other is fired). Leadership will reference the outstanding culture of “the old adswerve” when describing the company and then turn around and talk about how “this is adswerve 2.0” “we’re a completely different company now”. Leaders will impose any double standard they can to drive their narrative. “You have to be in a role for years before being promoted” but it only applies to you and exceptions will be made for whoever sucks up to leadership the most. I’ve never worked in an environment more flooded with boot licking. - Adswere’s latest rebrand is a great example of bad business decisions being made because everyone is afraid to provide feedback. Everyone just pretends like everything is great because you never know what person with power will come for you if you disagree with them. (If you are prone to seizures, I would encourage you NOT to visit our website) Bad Business Outlook: - Leadership consistently refuses to take any ownership for their part in the company’s lack of growth. Several years back to back of stagnant growth, poor investments, and a toxic culture lead employees to believe that the ship is sinking. Again, this comes back to leadership and their lack of vision for how to pivot and grow the business. We used to be a reseller, now we’re a consulting company but also an agency, now… who knows. Trying to be all things to all clients leaves you with confusion in the marketplace as our market share slowly trickles away, year after year. - Unfortunately, no amount of “billing like a lawyer” can save the downward spiral this business is on.