Where to start…
Since Silicon Valley Bank went under in 2022 and it was clear that after taking everyone to Vegas the company success, morale and culture has been on a rapid decline.
A lot of the decisions on who was to leave during “restructuring” made little to no sense at all, with it planting a spotlight on quasi-nepotism, managers retaining positions not based on success or good man management skills but their ability to brown nose the right people. With this in itself creating a hostile and somewhat clique team environment post redundancies with what was once a very collaborative and thriving culture.
The CEO at the time of laying off a large portion of the company was awaiting delivery of an Aston Martin from the UK and rumours are rife that he was warned by the BoDs that if he was to action the Vegas trip that he would have to make cuts, choosing prestige and retaining his cult of personality over sensible business ideals that he preached for the months prior.
Management and senior management have a definitive degree of favouritism and like the playground, decide who is “in this month” and who isn’t. Meaning those who don’t necessarily perform or contribute are protected based on personal relationships inside and outside of work, when others who do not fit in with their groups are target, with many of the managers having the personal skills of sandpaper and bordering on bullying or verbal abuse.
The whole environment makes it therefore incredibly difficult to raise grievances against certain managerial staff members due to the close interconnectedness of them all, not to mention the lack of impartiality in the HR team in responding to raised grievances. I’ve heard many times across multiple issues, how a grievance was raised and the axe actually came down on the individual that raised an issue against management. There have been talks of multiple relationships amongst senior leadership and with lower tier employees of Own being the cause of this protection.
All of this and a lack of pay rises in the last couple of years has led to the teams struggling to be motivated to perform, as well as some subpar product releases in certain fields making it tough to diversify pipeline.
