Avaaz Foundation Reviews

- CEO appears very off center at times - hearing a CEO use profanities about very senior ex staff (or anyone else) on a organisation wide call was a recent low-light of my professional experiences. - practices such as retreats where circles are formed, and then people are excluded from the circle if they're not 'clean' with Avaaz, it's CEO etc are at best not for everybody, at worst unsafe for people's mental health. - can be difficult to get managerial engagement in anything other than your emotional or mental state - feedback is up down and sideways, but feedback up the way is regularly taken to be sign of an emotional issue with yourself. Get's a bit wearing over time. - The staff as a whole are often treated more like a campaign target to be influenced than anything else. E.g. staff questionnaires are used to inform how to influence the staff as if it were a political campaign rather than an opportunity to hear feedback. - CEO is an explicit proponent of 'a strong, almost cult like culture' in the workplace as a path towards highly functioning teams. In practice what this means can vary from the mundane (feedback is important, decisions made by the leads should be executed on excellently, be respectful to colleagues etc) to the unusual such as: - organisation meetings being temporarily replaced with 'wisdom circles' where staff are only permitted to participate if CEO perceives you to be 'following your nudge/flowing from your center and not coming from a head space' - Encouraged to make ritualized affirmations and commitments in highly pressurized situations in front of whole organisation , e.g. 'I am clean with [CEO] as my leader' and 'I am clean with Connection Culture' with the implication that this team is not for you and you should find new work if you don't feel comfortable doing so - Dancing meditations at retreat were a bit weird for me personally. Some people loved them so perhaps down to personal taste - Strong predisposition to take constructive feedback as a sign of victimhood from the person giving feedback - CEO leading realtime, organisation wide discussions of whether or not leavers are 'clean' or 'unclean' when they leave - At times there's been an intense focus on an 'almost spiritual' direction for the organisation and its work - lack of board or shareholder style oversight for the CEO - At times more interest in 'cultural alignment' than proficiency or productivity - poorly communicated unilateral changes to employment conditions - double speak common 'if you have been with Avaaz long enough you will know what we mean by X..... ' - strong insider/outsider dynamics, that have at times become evident internally as well as externally (e.g. when the the team was sent to different retreats based on their self-rating of their 'cleanness') - work life balance is highly dependent on role and location and personal circumstances - be sure to get an explicit representation of expectations before starting as some timezone's lead to antisocial meeting times on a daily basis. - Trumpian gaslighting in evidence when major management mistakes are made, it has at times felt like its easier to spend weeks of organisational time denying what's happened than a few moments to admit a mistake - at it's worst it can feel like an organisation built by a CEO who's used members money to form their own echo chamber to nurse an enormous but fragile ego

For an organization that pushes change in the world, (ironically) it has quite a difficulty to evolve inside, accept changes, and embrace either new ways of working or organizing itself.