A top down culture of fear pervades the entire company. The CEO is very temperamental and strict. This means that management are generally more apt to hide problems than fix them. In the department I worked in, the manager was a major problem. They were petty, vindictive, and would lash out at employees they did not like. Every single employee had complained about their horrible treatment of our department, but management would not solve the issue. We never got any official reason why, but the issues were never addressed. This caused an insane turnover rate of something like 11 people within a 5 year span. COVID is mentioned in many reviews. Management expected us to get approval to go "more than one hour's travel away from the office". This included on weekends and days off. Then employees were required to test and quarantine regardless of whether or not they had any reason to believe they were exposed. Furthermore, if someone did get COVID, they were not allowed to return until they tested negative, in defiance of CDC guidelines at the time. They were required to test once per week in this time. These measures were kept in effect long after the rest of the world had moved on. They also required non-vaccinated employees to test every single week, regardless of their exposures. All of this really highlighted the lack of trust management has in their employees. There were many unwritten or outdated rules that employees were expected to follow. the most egregious example that comes to mind was that employees were expected to take no more than 5 sick days per year. People were in constant fear that their coworkers would report them to management for minor infractions. These rules were also not applied equally with certain departments being notable favorites. It really felt as if management assumed employees were plotting to take advantage of them and that they needed countermeasures in place. At the end of the day, one's success came down to stroking the ego of their superiors, not the quality of their work. Loyalty is prized above all. Also it was well known that Management pressured employees to leave 5 star reviews on Glassdoor in order to drive up ratings. So their ratings should honestly be lower. I understand that this is just my experience, but I believe it is shared by many who work there. I hope this review can help people who are discerning a career at Matador, that they can avoid this terrible place. I also hope that it will cause management to reflect on the culture that they have built and see how truly awful it is, though that might be a little vain of me.
