Toxic culture, CEO is questionable as a leader - Recensione dipendente - Director of Marketing presso Netwoven

I sat on the executive leadership team so I have some valuable insight into the culture. Terrible HR policies including extremely limited vacation time as well as docking you hours where you "owe" them hours, it was not uncommon for almost everyone I spoke with to have negative vacation hours. The burnout was incredible. Because of this, they also lost good people along the way. I got sick with Covid and was out for 10 days and they took this out of my PTO claiming "We have no sick days at Netwoven, only PTO and once that is gone you don't have any more time off" by the way that is 14 days total, sick time and PTO. When I quit I was negative 22hrs of vacation and they stated they owed me no more money on my last day of resignation and just called it "even". They don't trust you. Since they're a Microsoft company they send you a laptop where they have full control and visibility over everything you do including your browsing history, hours your online, how much your using your computer, apps you use and files you save, I wouldn't put it past them to also have camera access so I made sure to close my laptop every night. Extremely unsettling how much they spy on you, don't trust you, and don't hold any responsibility for employees to be accountable, they won't even give you the chance to be accountable. Salaried employee? Expect to put in your hours you worked each week like you work at retail hourly job. You will log each hour you worked each day into a system salaried or not. Now on to the CEO, we worked very closely, I reported directly to him. While he is a fantastic and super nice guy in person, outside of work, his work ethic leaves little to be desired. He is a work-a-holic which is not uncommon for CEO's but he kind of expects everyone else to follow along in that regard. My biggest hurdle with him was trust, he never trusted me, in fact, I would say he doesn't trust many on his team and is very controlling of every aspect of your day-to-day duties. It was not uncommon for him to have 3-4 meetings a week with me, im sure a CEO of a biz like this can spend his time elsewhere, it almost seemed like he wanted to do the job of marketing. I was micromanaged to death and he even openly admitted this as a fault on many occasions and while he would let up for a bit, he would go back to his old ways of just riding you every chance he got. On many occasions I was belittled by the CEO with remarks like "I don't think you've ever done this" or "I don't believe you" when I would give my professional opinion or guidance on a subject. I have 20+ yrs of experience btw and did not take kindly to his insults. He is extremely aggressive in his behavior towards everyone on the team and before I left, on multiple occasions, tried to persuade me into quitting. You can't pressure employees into quitting, you can't say things like "Well, maybe you shouldn't work here" or "Maybe this just isn't the right fit for you" you either fire people or you don't say those things to them. HR can look up "Constructive discharge1" in the CA law code for reference on this behavior. My team was remote in India and while im sure they're fantastic people in the region they reside in, if you want to be an "American" company, you need American marketers. There are simply to many cultural differences to have a fully remote marketing team in a different country trying to market to Americans. I spent more time reviewing/fixing/training employees than I did actually doing important marketing work, most of this was grammar or technical concepts that weren't grasped easily by these employees. Any time you are ever on a call with the CEO expect him to open an excel file and you're somehow supposed to do your job now with that info. Everything is manually pulled from excel sheets which makes reports a nightmare. And the CEO wants reporting, that's like his big thing he wants, yet he won't pony up the money for something like a centralized CRM that shows that information. He's extremely reluctant to use anything outside of a Microsoft product even though I showed him our competitors were using other technology. We were forced to used Dynamics and it was still broken when I left. I was the sole person in charge of launching the CRM project with zero experience in it and time and time again brought up to the leadership team they needed to run bringing on a CRM like an external project so it got completed. It never did. I urged the CEO to bring on Hubspot on many occasions and he once told me "Don't ever say the word Hubspot again" so if that gives you any kind of idea what you'll be dealing with in a marketing role, this is it. We lost a lot of employees to competitors because they simply had a better workplace and benefits. We also lost a few really great people for no other reason than burnout and ego. Everyone was expected to hit these crazy, lofty revenue goals with zero actual plan on how to do it. The marketing team was expected to perform literal miracles and on many occasions was directly blamed for revenue not pouring in or for other departments not hitting their sales goals.