Dante's Inferno - Anonymous employee AWeber Employee Review

- Abrasive executive management style - High turnover rate, especially among technical team - Information is micro-managed, and communicated selectively. - Under stress the executive team’s behavior becomes more controlling, secretive, defensive, and untrusting The organization suffers from an assortment of disabilities, dysfunctions and diseases that no amount of incremental therapy can cure. The executive team is by and large a group of bullying, conniving, dishonest, bickering, blame-fixing, scapegoating, tyrants. Which would be tolerable if only they demonstrated competence, accountability or just a modicum of wisdom. But alas. Not any of the above. The place is over managed and under-led. While the executive teams claims they want self-directed work teams with distributed decision making capabilities, and “leadership at every level” (and have sponsored company-wide training workshops on the topic), they maintain an autocratic and authoriitarian executive management-dominated system. This is worse than poor implementation. It is self-defeating hypocrisy. (Then again it could also be insanity.) The executive group's command and control micromanagement has reduced employee empowerment to "You have a choice: do what you've been told, or else we’ll fire you.” They have destroyed a once promising culture by creating bitterness, cynicism and mistrust at all levels. What ever you do, don’t remark on the Emperor’s new clothes. Candor is not safe. Truth is treason. AWeber engages in extensive marketing and PR campaigns which attempt to lure not just customers but job candidates with an image of what a great employer they are. But scratch the surface and get past the veneer: The core values of AWeber have become a myth, a bunch of hot air. They run as deep as the etching on the glass with which they were printed. The values and future vision are ignored by the executive team whenever that is more convenient for the bottom line or their own egos. The executive team has also descended into a swamp of legalism with implicit mechanisms of fear instead of practices that breed trust and responsibility. Employees are viewed and treated like children that need adult supervision. Before you get too far in thinking about rented out a few hours of life every day in exchange for a paycheck by working there, first you might inquire, for example, about the Social Media Policy. (It was dated last year but it seems to have come from a decade a ago.) What will be next? A doctor's note for sick days? Management has apparently learned very little from the many many exit interviews they've received over the years. The folks at the top see what they want to see, and hear what they want to hear. They seem to think of people as cogs in the machine, parts with no soul, no direction of their own. All their people are simply fungible resources. The executive team's level of paradigm paralysis is matched only by their narcissism. Vascitate ogni speranza, voi ch'intrate.