Good colleagues, vapid leadership - Creative Director Fresh Consulting Employee Review

The company culture is friendly and welcoming with a talented staff that delivers high quality work at a great value to the customer.

The company was growing rapidly leading up to the pandemic which made for typical growing pains in staffing.

Fresh puts real effort into culture programs, and the workplace generally feels friendly and welcoming. There are many talented individual contributors across the company, and a lot of people genuinely care about doing good work and supporting each other.

The biggest challenge is organizational clarity and communication, especially within the digital studio. Management direction can feel inconsistent, and recent organizational changes and acquisitions have changed team structure in negative ways. There also seems to be frequent leadership change or shifting ownership, which makes it difficult for teams to understand priorities, connect day-to-day work to executive goals, and maintain momentum. At times, the digital studio feels disconnected from the broader C-suite strategy. Under newer studio management, the work culture shifted from feeling relatively balanced to more after-hours work and delayed feedback. In my experience, feedback that should have happened during the workday or in regular check-ins was often pushed until after hours. Career growth and feedback were not well supported in my experience. Over roughly nine months, most scheduled 1:1s focused on personal development and growth were canceled, with only a few actually happening outside of project-specific feedback. When a new career growth structure was introduced, I was placed below the level I had been hired into without a clear explanation or supporting examples. Pay does not feel competitive for the level of work expected, and the sales pipeline for digital specific projects does not always seem stable enough to support hiring plans.