All the stress, none of the satisfaction - Anonymous employee Akris Employee Review

This was one of the most disorganized places I've worked and one of the most rigid and inflexible at the same time. Middle management is a mess but company guidelines are too uptight and antiquated. It ruins just about everything that could be good for the teams I worked with (e-commerce, communications, marketing, etc). The department managers who should be working together and coordinating their efforts are too busy competing, gossiping about each other, keeping information siloed from other departments, and fleshing out their petty feelings. They're limited in their skills and it became clear to me almost immediately that they manage work they don't fully understand. Apart from e-comm, it felt like a lot of the managers never worked within the type of team they now manage and never learned how to run their them effectively. I hoped I could make a positive difference but quickly realized your positive efforts will go unappreciated here. It felt like the middle managers (apart from photog and e-commerce) are out of touch and don't seem to care. The meetings feel pointless, projects are constantly being changed around and redirected, and the teams are forced to pick up the pieces and work through the roadblocks their managers should also be focusing on. But you have to do it behind their backs because if certain managers find out you're helping another team, they quickly want to put a stop to it. There's also a culture of scapegoating, so managers rarely own up to their mistakes and look for someone to blame them on instead. I watched a colleague get bullied by a manager almost every day and HR did absolutely nothing to put a stop to it. Overall, the colleagues are nice but the managers make things more stressful and severe than they need to be. The CEO is also kind of racist, sexist, and transphobic. He's made horrible comments about models, employees, etc. and everyone's expected to just kind of pretend like it's not a big deal. It is a big deal and a big part of why I made the decision to leave.