Management who make staff mistreatment their key business focus. - Venue Partner Barcats Employee Review

Quite literally the most toxic place I have ever worked in. Which is created by the bullying management, not the staff, although that is the narrative that the senior members of management try to portray. Staff are run to the ground with constant emails and messages, regardless of the time of day, you need to be available because “hospo is 24hrs”. At one point, photos were requested by management in a WhatsApp chat to “prove” everyone was working, merely hours before we were supposed to get paid, which could have only been interpreted as a threat not to pay their staff. Barcats is an example of micromanagement at its finest, even down to trying to tell people what they can and can’t do with relationships in their personal lives, so no wonder people feel like they have to choose to leave and add to the businesses alarmingly high staff turnover rate. A quick look at their LinkedIn stats (available to anyone to see) will show you how drastically the number of employees at barcats has fallen by in the last 12 months and the CEO & COO are the core of the issue. The current recruitment strategy is to hire staff who will be “on the right side” and supporters of what can only be described as a ‘forced following’ with a simple “you are either in or out” policy. Do you have skills to support the job? Are you creative? Do you have opinions you would like to share on how your team should be led or managed? Leave them at the door when you work at Barcats, the business strategy is based off of a door knocking, deceiving businesses who give them money in the hopes that they are actually “helping hospo be better”, On and forget a marketing strategy, as long as you can achieve numbers through paid socials and repetitive creatives you’ll do just fine, just make sure you’re happy to be a yes person to anything that comes from the CEO and execute things in spite of if you actually think they will work (because your opinion is irrelevant no matter how much experience you have). Biggest piece of advice, do not work here unless you’re ready to completely leave work/life boundaries at the door and invest every single breath into a quickly dying dream that could have actually worked if more trust and support had been given to the people who have been hired over the last year or so.