Professional Gaslighting - Anonymous employee Web Summit Employee Review

1.0
21 Mar 2022
Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

This company attracts enthusiastic, intelligent, driven and multi talented individuals from all around the world. However lack of career progression, low wages in some departments vs inflated wages in others, as well as some of the most dreadful management I have ever had the unfortunate experience of working with creates a culture that either forces people out prematurely or a sort of Stockholm syndrome like love for the toxic environment. I made amazing connections with some brilliant young minds who will go on to do great things, once they leave.

Cons

It took months to unlearn the damage done to my confidence in my time there. I left entirely broken, thinking I was not good enough, I should be grateful for having a job and not worth any sort of payrise. Senior management create projects for people to work on only to tell them at the end they are stupid and they could have done it better themselves, then take full credit for it if the CEO likes it. There are multiple underqualified people managing teams of highly qualified people in slightly different fields they make absolutely no effort to understand, encourage or even just basically manage. Without going into specifics, sexist comments were made by senior management towards me in order to undermine me in my end of year review when I was looking for a standard payrise after two years of employment. There are plenty of incidents where the CEO or senior management have been incredibly aggressive towards female members of staff. It is unsurprising there are so few women in senior positions. They keep expanding their offices abroad rather than in Ireland as it is generally accepted that if they had to publish salaries there would be a huge discrepancy between male and female pay rates for similar jobs. In addition, the HR department is a joke. It is quite simply one rule for some (the CEOs friends and favourites) and another for everyone else. It is well known that incidents have been entirely swept under the rug for some people and others are held to an impossibly high standard so they can never progress. Whenever their actions are questioned, they lash out and start slinging mud at whomever is closest. And every last rumour about the CEO is true. He is genuinely unhinged and should be kept away from his employees. The company would really benefit from his removal as the "Yes Men" he has surrounded himself with permeate the toxicity down through every level of the company.

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Web Summit Response
4y
Thank you for your feedback, we really appreciate you taking the time to share. We are very disappointed that your time in WebSummit had such an effect on you. We take your comments very seriously, and would like to know more about the specifics that you reference. Bullying and harassment of staff is not tolerated in WebSummit, in line with our dignity at work policy that all employees have access to. We give employees every opportunity to air their grievances through avenues such as office vibe, 15five, yearly reviews, weekly 121s, EAP to name a few. These are valuable tools in ensuring employees have the best experience possible. I would appreciate you contacting me in confidence, where we can discuss your issues, and we can hopefully acknowledge and learn from your experience. sebastian.white@websummit.com Many thanks Sebastian

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