Just about everything actually working and operating in that environment. Clients and prospective applicants beware, they laid off all the top talent, and any remaining talent is already starting to look for new jobs. The 'dream culture' is just a front they put up to lure talent in. They ask staff to leave google and glassdoor reviews in all staff meetings. Let me explain more...
LACK OF LEADERSHIP
-The Partners and CEO always just tell staff to 'find their own solutions', which sounds nice, but how this works in practice is that your boss/partners will not give you any guidance, they when a project or client fails, the Partners take 0% of the responsibility when they provide literally no guidance at all, and then lash out at you even though they couldn’t have been bothered when you initially asked for help.
-Partners are terrible at taking feedback. A group of employees confronted a partner about toxic behavior, and the response from the leadership was 'We are happy to help with any issues as long as [the partner in question] is not the problem.' So basically they are not willing to make any adjustments or take any feedback.
-The Partners started a Creative Services department at the company, but had no plan on how to integrate the team nor how they should operate within the CTC ecosystem. So there was constant tension within CS and between CS and the rest of the company because there was no connecting points or mutual understanding. They hired multiple people how came from Creative Agencies, but then refused to listen to their feedback that was being constantly flagged for over 6 months.
LACK OF TRANSPARENCY
-In the fall, a single employee was laid off, and the CEO gave an over an hour long speech about how this was a huge inflection point for the company and they learned and that no one else was getting laid off. Fast forward a month later, entire Creative Services department is dissolved and laid off. So they clearly had no idea what they are doing.
FINANCIAL MISMANAGEMENT
-One of the biggest financial issues that started on the top was the disconnect from the BizDev team to what the company actually did. The CEO and BD teams would sign contracts that were so vaguely worded that they didn't set up the client nor the internal teams for success because the contracts were so ill-defined. The CEO and BD teams never thought to consult the actual teams that would have to execute on the contracts before signing them which meant there were massive misalignments of expectations.
-Middle managers and junior staff would frequently flag financial mismanagement or issues with budgets and contracts to leadership, but were always told to 'stay the course', or 'just do what you need to make it happen', and then the leadership would be angry when there were budget shortfalls. Absolutely 0 accountability or willingness to ever admit a bad project or contract was ever their fault.
POOR COMPANY PRIORITIES
-Anybody who reads about CTC sees its a 'dreamer' culture and they care about employ culture first. However, when it comes to actually saving employee jobs, they couldn't care less.
-Also, this year they spent nearly a half million dollars on 'employee care', and no one thought to rein that spending in by the HR department before laying off a whole department?
-They openly admitted they underpay employees compared to industry standards, which is tough to see when they preach their values so highly.
