10y
At NatureBox, we encourage bold discussions and appreciate your honest, yet tough, feedback. We couldn’t agree more that we have an amazing team here at NatureBox. And we hope our current team members feel like we’re continue to feel like we’re growing and improving as a company.
We recently started to respond actively on Glassdoor. You took your valuable time about a year ago to write this feedback, and this is a good opportunity for us to see where the company has made progress and respond directly to some of the things you pointed out:
“Unlimited supply of beer, allowed for very specific departments”
- Since day 1, this has been a perk is for everyone during reasonable hours. We trust our employees to be responsible and don’t promote/condone anyone from grabbing a beer when they feel like it.
“Office hours...excludes lower level employees”
- Office hours benefit the entire company, and that’s been the way since day 1. Initially we held these at 4p on Fridays, but after feedback from our team — we changed them to 12p so that more people could attend.
“Leadership is horrible. Little or no experience in management”
“mostly very young and this is a first job, often treats employees like children”
“the number of young, inexperienced members of certain departments, is a joke”
- We take these comments very seriously. We stand behind our entire team, meaning everyone at the company, including you, and our management team. We’re proud of every single manager at NatureBox, b/c they dedicate their time to the company, and seek to get better every day.
- We believe we have developed a diverse management team consisting of world-class leaders in food, technology, finance, operations, sales and marketing.
- We continue to invest in management training and initiatives that will allow us to continue to develop great leaders.
While we don’t have context around your specific situation, here are a few things we’ve done since last year to ensure that we continue to improve:
- We’ve hired more managers in each department — from middle managers to industry leaders
- We’ve improved our training programs and infrastructure, including our Quickstart program to help new team members get up to speed quickly. We’ve also started a management training program to strengthen our ability to communicate, provide feedback, and hire.
- We continue to invest in helping our managers become better, and have made executive coaching opportunities available to our managers.
“Having any type of interaction with co-workers, is frowned upon”
“Promote a friendly atmosphere, not a silent classroom”
“Encourage employees to talk to each other”
- We do a number of things to promote interaction with amazing co-workers. Here are just some of the things we’ve implemented /improved upon over the last 12 months: buddy lunches, open desk seating plan, large common space, monthly company sponsored events like happy hours, off-sites, and scavenger hunts.
- Like you said, we have amazing people, and we do everything we can to encourage collaboration on and off the court.
“This company does not learn from past mistakes, repeats the same mistakes over & over”
- As a young startup, we definitely make mistakes. We don’t try to hide them, but we do try to learn from them and get better.
- We’ve come a long way since starting three years ago, and continue to get better. Based on the points above, we hope the team here feel that NatureBox is a place that continues to learn and improve.
Snack on,
Gautam and Ken
Co-founders