Although the company has grown nicely, the working culture and resourcing has never been this bad, specifically in marketing & product functions.
- There's a culture of sweeping the negatives under the rug and only talk about the positives: results of projects are post-rationalised to find positives, even though they weren't part of initial objectives; Directors+ are VERY concerned with upwards management and discourage their teams to highlight negatives and in return teams are hesitant to talk about them, even when they are not their direct responsibility, as they are afraid of repercussions. "highlights vs. smelly socks" intro slides and post mortems have also clearly and long disappeared in favor of celebratory emails and excited slack posts, storytelling, sizzle reels etc. It's a clear culture shift.
- There are many Directors and Senior Directors that are notoriously brilliant jerks, mainly male and especially in Dallas office with some in London too: they are subject experts but are put in positions that require management of multiple people and teams across different offices and they have extremely poor (and notoriously poor) people management skills. They are anxious micro-managers; unaware of cultural differences; brash in tone and sometimes plain rude (especially with people under them of course); careless about team's recognition, work/life balance and morale apart from small low-effort and low-impact actions like "thank you" notes or team lunches; jealous when someone in their team manages to shine autonomously; unable to listen to disagreement or negative feedback (at best) or punishing people for it (at worst) and solely focused on their area of expertise and on upwards management. Everyone under them is afraid to speak up because of repercussions as they've retained and expanded their positions in recent years as opposed to detractors who are all slowly leaving. Everyone above them is either unaware, or aware but valuing their brilliance in their subject more than anything else unfortunately or mistaking poor people management skills for character quirks.
- Lack of ownership: Despite the title, many roles up to Director level are still focused on execution rather than really giving direction and this is due to the fact that many decisions, even non-critical ones, have to go very far up the approval chain. Leadership team is obsessed with details and control which means teams have very little ownership over projects, are not empowered to make the decisions they should be making alone and can't act as fast as they should. There are a lot of RAPID and RACIS shown around however the reality is that Senior Directors, VPs and Leadership are NOT comfortable with something they slightly disagree with to be implemented, even if it's small, non-critical, outside of their direct area of expertise or a product of trade-offs they are not aware of. I've also seen opinions of certain leadership members being taken as gospel, even when dissonant with research and data (or teams having to conduct ad-hoc time consuming research and analysis just to disprove the opinion of a leadership member over something that doesn't even belong to their function or area of expertise and that would just need the expertise and gravitas of the functional lead to be disproved).
- Poor resourcing: in terms of resources, Hotels.com still thinks it's an agile start-up, however in terms of expectations, budgets and complexity of projects, it is a big and fully formed company. Many function leaders squeeze their resources to the maximum causing burnout and every headcount addition needs to be substantiated with a very high level of detail and effort, even when the amount of workload and stretched bandwidth is evident and even when these requests are supported by senior people manages, whose job is to look at resources vs. desired output. There's a lot of talk of "prioritisation" but it's all a facade: in far too many teams, people that actually de-prioritise projects because of bandwidth issues, are slowly sidelined or pushed out, because there's no real culture that supports honest conversations on prioritization and resourcing trade-offs (despite what the leadership team thinks). And the worst part is that people really really care about their projects but they are not put in a condition to really succeed or do a good job.
