Pros
Lots of perks, free meals, great discounts, easy to work your way up if you show initiative, benefits after a year, the staff are really great, and depending on the location can have a positive work environment. The owners had a great idea with an incredible push for values and culture.
Cons
In my many years working in the industry, my experience at MeeT in Yaletown is by far the worst experience I have ever had. At first, we all excused problems for being a new location. But the issue here will not go away, because the issue is management. Management, as stated in one review, is abusive, dishonest and puts their needs and desires before their staff. Management pits employees against each other, makes empty promises to appease workers, gossips about workers, readily extends blame to others if they need to cover up issues, uses the leads to do all of the work for them, has blatant favouritism and is sexist. There are some very serious problems here, and I don’t even know where to start. I have many very serious concerns about this workplace, but as another review noted, this is not the space to share these experiences. The favouritism becomes very apparent in scheduling; a few workers are given all the busiest closing shifts for months straight, despite being vocal about it affecting their mental and physical health. On the other hand, favourites have only day shifts, get the same compensation, and are not held accountable when they fail to do their prepping and turnover tasks, which ends up jeopardizing the fatigued night staff. Even if we were promised day shifts when we applied, we slowly get coerced into full night schedules. Once we are working regular nights, we are scheduled this way even after changing our availability, every time we ask we are told “next week we will change it up”, and it never happens. Likewise, there are workers who get time off whenever they please, while others get shamed when they request time and time and time again to have shifts that align with their life/school/mental health/ability to get home after work. Even once we voice our frustration to management, nothing ever changes. On the contrary, often we are punished for our lack of flexibility by getting less shifts. Management regularly chilled at the bar while the waitlist is over an hour and everyone is struggling to keep up, rarely came to help and never covered shifts. After some employees grew the courage to approach HR about these issues, management started cornering employees trying to find out who tattled. Employees are scared and exhausted. Notably, there are also safety hazards that have been brought up to management, such as how the fryers are cleaned, which has been ignored despite having multiple employees wind up with severe oil burns. Employees are scared to report injuries as they have been shamed for previous cuts, etc. Employees who have had severe health concerns or doctors appointments/notes have also been shamed, either for not being "flexible enough" or for "not taking their job seriously enough”. The staff are consistently asking to be moved to other locations, but managers told us that we can’t switch locations, accusing other locations of “poaching staff”. In general, a lot of coercive, abusive behaviour. I never felt safe and I never felt supported. I felt taken advantage of, exhausted, and my mental and physical health deteriorated a lot working at Meet. Managers are extremely self serving, unprofessional, and take advantage of workers. There is no reason we can’t all share day shifts. There is no reason we should work nights for months straight because the mangers and their favourites monopolize schedules and time off requests. All of us want to have a healthy life, time to see our partners and families. Time to sleep. I am a much happier, more stable, healthier person since I left MeeT. I am appalled by the things I still hear from my coworkers who remain.
