Pros
There are some really great people and nice facilities.
Cons
TLDR: - CEO’s negative impact is significant to job satisfaction. HR and C-suite cover for him and blame employees. - Joined "The Front" with positive expectations but experienced a negative workplace culture. - CEO's leadership style is fear-driven, impacting job satisfaction significantly. - Poor communication, limited interaction with my direct manager (CEO), and reliance on intermediaries for information. - Misuse of scrum methodology with micromanagement and focus on minute details. - Inefficient planning processes with lengthy cycles, double-tracked to 15-minute increments. - Witnessed inappropriate workplace behavior, including the CEO massaging an employee's shoulders. - Unfair termination with false claims about project completion, email delays, and unfinished tasks. - Leadership dynamics were unclear; reporting to multiple heads creating a challenging work environment. - Encourages transparency, authenticity, clear goals, and autonomy for employees in management advice. - Calls for better leadership practices, avoiding intimidation, fostering collaboration, and treating employees with respect and humanity. Specifics: I saw my first red flag during the interviewing phase: over multiple interviews, there was a positive vibe from the panel—until the CEO attended. I read negative reviews on Glassdoor about him and the company (several of them countered by HR). I chose to hope for the best when I took the job. Unfortunately, I now concur with the negative reviewers. The CEO rules with fear and ever-changing whims. I was told multiple times that at The Front, there are two customers: those who come to the gym to work out and climb, and whatever the CEO is feeling that day. Poor Communication, Poor Management Despite being hired by and reporting directly to the CEO, I only got to speak to him 1:1 once in five weeks. Most of the communication directed to me or my team came from two people known as the “CEO’s Sword and Shield"—the Head of Staff and the Director of HR. They were effectively tasked with cracking the whip on whatever the CEO was thinking about that day, making excuses for him, and softening the blow that fell on staff. Other communication came through large group meetings, some of which the CEO attended. He showed little interest in marketing, and there had been massive turnover in the department and complete instability. Apparently the CEO doesn’t even like the word “marketing,” so serious discussions were taking place in group meetings as to what to change the name of the marketing department to. To be fair, we were combining marketing with the membership team, and it needed a name. But it was a bad indicator when a long meeting was dedicated to the main goal, “What should we call a team that manages the website, external communications, email, design, member communications, social media, and public relations? . . . other than marketing?” I was told that the term marketing was not to be used by anyone at the company anymore (because we have to take care of our main customer, the CEO). Micromanaging Is Not Scrum I believe one of the deciding factors in my hiring was that I am a scrum master, and The Front alleges to use scrum. Yet I quickly realized their approach to scrum was essentially micro-managing. Using an impressive automating setup in Azure, employees had to make their Azure board match their Outlook calendar perfectly, down to every 15-minute increment. These were occasionally audited and I heard of resulting reprimands or firing by the Sword and Shield. I was told during my exit interview that one reason they didn’t want me there anymore was that I didn’t like their scrum. What I actually said (when asked what I thought of their scrum approach) was, “I see what you’re doing with your daily tracking, but it’s philosophically different from how I’ve done scrum in the past.” Poor Planning I also found the approach they take to planning at The Front to be inefficient. Some groups are planning on trimesters and others on semesters (defined as six months). Each planning cycle takes six weeks and includes many meetings of planning, Q&A, and training—all, of course, double tracked to increments of 15 minutes. I think I received another ding to my reputation when I remarked that other places I’ve worked usually knock out planning in a three-day, offsite meeting, and that this method—allowing planning to consume 6 weeks out of a 16-week cycle (37.5% of our work time)—could perhaps be pared back. Inappropriate Behavior and Kowtowing The singular 1:1 meeting I had with the CEO happened about a week after my hire. It was outside, in the courtyard area of the Salt Lake OG location. From a short distance, I watched the CEO walk up to a group of four employees working at a table. At one point, he leaned towards a younger female staffer, said something, then started massaging her shoulders. She stated something along the lines of it feeling good and helping with the stress of work. Although it looked consensual, it was inappropriate for the workplace. It seemed I was the only one uncomfortable, but I later learned that the company operated with a strong culture of kowtowing to the boss as the best way to keep your job. Why/How Was I Let Go? The reasons given for my ouster were that I had not completed a project correctly and on time. Both claims are untrue. But first, some backstory: When the shoulder massage ended and my meeting with the CEO finally began, he gave me his direction for marketing. He wanted zero paid ads, as his membership base was solid enough. We just needed to focus on a plan to improve retention—that was my main goal. He wanted all communications (especially in emails and on social media) to have a clear voice: simple, matter-of-fact, and straight to the point. The Front had a small, gamified program for members they’d started a few months earlier, and it needed a lot of help. This was my main motivation to work there: I was excited to create a great, gamified membership-retention program that could be a huge boon for the company. At the end of a two-week sprint cycle, I had a video-call review with my team, the CEO, the Sword, and another person. As the meeting was concluding, the CEO proposed two promotions: one for new members and another for winter pass holders. The first promotion would use internal communication, email, social media, signage, and front-desk employees' assistance. The second promotion would incorporate paid ads in addition to the other tactics listed above. After the CEO and the other person exited the call, my team and the Sword chatted about this sudden change in direction. The Sword told us, half laughing, that “the Eye of Sauron is on marketing.” This was more than a little foreboding. The team successfully completed the first promotion, except for a snag when the CEO sent four emails generated by ChatGPT without any direction on whether to use them. The voice of these emails was completely off-brand. He sent them at 5:30 p.m. on Friday, after my team and I had designed, written, and scheduled two emails to be sent Monday. I voiced my concerns about branding and reminded the CEO of the voice he’d directed me to use for emails. Regardless, the CEO advised my team to stall our campaign to consider different options. With the help of the Sword, my team and I managed to get the CEO to agree to an automated A/B test for different email versions. My team's email won the test, and the emails went out with a decent open rate. The next day, the CEO asked an employee to give paid-ad permissions to an outside email. When I inquired if I could help him with a paid ad, he stated that, “it should have been done last week.” I realized things were even more amiss when a member of my team informed me she’d already given the outsider permission. Later that day, I was scheduled for a meeting with the CEO, the Sword, and others. Just before, the Sword informed me that the location had changed to a dingy, poorly lit conference room and that the CEO would not be there as “he is out of the office today.” This was the first of several gaslighting attempts, as I had just seen the CEO at the original meeting location. I ran to the new location and found the Sword and an HR rep at a table. I was being let go. I was told that my probationary period had resulted in my not staying on at the company. Yet no probationary period or working interview had been discussed at my hire. When I asked the reasons why, I was told that one reason (which I wrote about previously) was that I didn’t like the way they tracked everything and their procedures. All I had said was that what they were doing wasn’t traditional scrum, as I had been trained on it. The next reason for my termination was that I had sent out an email a day late. When I reminded the Sword that the delay was because the CEO told us to stall the email send, he said that didn’t happen; when I told him I could look it up on our messaging service, he would not let me. The third complaint was that a project was unfinished. I informed him that I had submitted the project the previous day. He told me it wasn’t submitted. He then told me that I’d failed to get out ads for the fall promotion campaign. I reminded him that we’d all agreed on that (chatting multiple times about it), since we were doing paid ads for the winter promotion. He told me that wasn’t true. I had verifiable evidence to counter all of his claims, but that did not matter. I commented that although I could recognize this as gaslighting, I also recognized that no matter what I said, I was going to be fired today. This was the only thing The Sword and I agreed on. Leadership Dynamics I’d like to speak more specifically to the dynamic of leadership’s impact on intra-office relations. Though I technically reported to the CEO, I had to funnel most things through the Chief of Staff and/or the Director of HR, and some other things through other leadership. It was unclear who I actually reported to. When I observed other employees surviving successfully, it seemed that the answer was to placate all three of the main heads of leadership. People on my team did this by kowtowing to random whims of leadership, taking on projects outside of their scope of work with minimal input, and having insufficient time to meaningfully accomplish tasks. They were expected to excel at every front while enduring verbal abuse, belittlement, and fear tactics. When they shared their frustrations with me, I empathized and worked with them to create positive change. Looking back, I think that several of these conversations were likely reported back to the Sword or the Shield—but in a narrow, negative way that would fit the leadership’s negative opinion of marketing. Perhaps it was a power move to usurp my position, or a desire to better ingratiate themselves into the system, but toxic environments can cause employees to take toxic actions in order to succeed. I feel like I supported my team, yet was made a scapegoat because I was in the middle of a game I didn’t know we were playing. That’s probably the saddest part; I really liked my team and thought the best of them. An Honest Review When I read about The Front on Glassdoor, I saw that the HR director countered the negative reviews. I let that sway me to give the company a go. I know I’m easy to work with and am competent. And now here I am, an ex-employee expecting that same treatment: I expect the Shield will minimize my statement, denigrate me, or claim that I just wasn’t a good fit. This is my statement of personal experience and it is expressed without any malice. I appreciate Glassdoor’s reviews and want to help anyone else who may consider employment with The Front. (And I’d like to thank Chat GPT for writing my review’s headline and TLDR.)