A Dream Job Full of False Promises, No Upward Growth, and Poor Leadership - Anonymous employee Element Three Employee Review

Dear Former Creative employee, You clearly took a lot of time to provide this feedback so I can see it is very important to you. Thank you for that. You are right, we really had a tough go of it last year in managing the loss of a client that, in any other company, would have resulted in the release of at least 25% of their workforce. That was the hardest era I can remember in my 8 years of working at Element Three. Our team spent days upon days doing research to learn from other companies who experienced this same situation to understand how they handled it and learn from their successes and their failures. So yes, you are right, there were a LOT of very important conversations going on that are misrepresented in your review as "whispers in back rooms". Our leadership team, and in particular our President, agonized over this situation and in the end she decided NOT to release 25% of our staff. Rather, she took the financial hit and the risk to fix it. The company rallied and we worked together as a team to protect our own by closing the gap and we came pretty close. What we did learn from this experience was that we could not fix it all fast enough to eliminate the need to release 5 people (vs 17) and that decision was not made with whispers in back rooms, I assure you. They were made by the collective department leadership based on input and feedback in many, many aspects of the work. None of these decisions were made easily or with any aspect of enjoyment or malicious intent. But they were all the right decisions and we stand by that and we came out of that experience a better, stronger company with confidence that we handled it in the very best way we could. As you know from your own experience, every person impacted was provided with generous severance, fully paid outplacement support and as much grace as we could muster in a difficult situation. You did have many good years at the company with tremendous freedom, flexibility, and support to not only work on exciting clients but also to work on your own personal brand and your own bold story. That is definitely not something you get anywhere else, at least not to the extent that we offered that to you and to others here. It makes me sad that in exchange for several years of enjoying all of the things that we work so hard every day to offer to our employees, you are left with these words to share. I know personally that your time here was very, very positive - I am truly sorry that it did not end in the way you wanted it to. You will definitely have a bright future, particularly with the strong personal brand you have built for yourself and we are proud to be part of the encouragement provided for you to be able to do some of that here. Karen Seketa VP of Talent Element Three