Pros
-Pro Deals
-Free membership
-Benefits
-Good co-workers
Cons
It's honestly disheartening to leave a review like this because the Front has such a large amount of potential to have an incredible work culture and community. The Front truly is cutting-edge in the climbing world and is changing and growing at a truly impressive rate. What the gym itself has done for the community is truly a wonderful thing and it is beyond saddening that the work culture and environment is as poor and frustrating as it is.
Some of the current employees (mostly managers or other higher-ups) have come onto here to defend the workplace and Dustin whilst gaslighting the naive reader by stating that only disgruntled employees will be leaving a review but that fails to negate the very high turnover rate, employee dissatisfaction, and almost comically low rating of the workplace on both Glassdoor and Indeed. It is one thing to state that employees may not be "the right fit" but when reviews are left over and over and people are also choosing to leave at alarming rates, then an internal examination should follow suit (in most cases you'd hope).
The main issue with being employed here is the lack of direction and overall confusion. When receiving advice or instruction from five different people in which all of them vary, it becomes increasingly confusing who to listen to or what exactly to do. The true answer normally comes from a lower-level employee who's been there long enough and that itself will oftentimes vary from what a manager says, especially the several new ones that seem to ask the Shift Lead the same question you have.
Beyond this, employees will be told that different things are acceptable and not having one standard to follow due to misinformation or lack of knowledge causes errors throughout the entire system. Beyond this, it seemed that every single employee I have spoken to holds a serious distaste for the job and simply has it to bide time or because of the membership/benefits. There was no real team culture or care for the job, just a simple going through the motions. The employees that do the bare minimum or even worse than that don't seem to get reprimanded for their actions and it becomes deeply discouraging to work hard or pour a large amount of effort into the job just to make up for someone else's lack of effort. The best employees I met there who are extremely diligent get brushed aside with their emails ignored and their requests and hopes for change brushed aside. This structure causes the overall performance of the team to slow and the highest performers to burn out. It becomes extremely frustrating to want to contribute to a workplace that doesn't appreciate you and that also accepts poor behavior. Multiple reports and complaints were made to higher management about this which were additionally brushed off.
I didn't expect to be part of the group that felt broken down and worn in by this company, but I became one of them. I even intially came into the workplace feeling so excited and grateful and attempted to voice that optimistic outlook to a lot of my coworkers and was met with "just wait, you'll see," or a "this place breaks down everyone," or "the best thing to do is the bare minimum and protect your mental health." The combined lack of respect for my coworkers and their frustrations added to the mentally taxing work environment. It oftentimes seemed as though the best method moving forward would be to work as little as possible and milk the workplace for what it is, which has never ever been my mindset towards contributing in an employment environment.
The changes in schedule, the lack of training and guidance, feeling unheard, feeling discouraged to work hard, unhappy work environment, etc. are all part of feeling small and unheard in what should be a wonderful work environment. The Front is so close yet so far and I really hope they dive deep into their management methods to see how they can fix an already crumbling employment structure. I did not need to be here a long time to know that.
