Wolf in Sheep's Clothing...Steer Clear!
Pros
My team was humble and hard working.
Cons
If you are considering applying here you should steer clear. In my 20+ year professional career, I’ve not experienced a more toxic micromanagement to the extreme, low trust, zero autonomy, narcissistic top-down command-and-conquer style work environment than at Trafilea. It’s the venerable ‘wolf in sheep’s clothing’, with flashy recruiting videos dazzling with what appears to be an amazing culture, work-life balance, career development focus, and polished onboarding. In reality, this couldn’t be further from the truth! This company will burn you to the ground and make you an example to others. After only 2 weeks of employment, it was already evident the effects this toxic work environment had on the people in my org. I had leaders who would no longer interact with the CEO, had to take stress days to cope with effects to their health and yet others on the brink of tears telling me they never knew it was possible to work so hard, all after having been constantly berated by company leadership for which I spent a majority of my time in their defense. Additionally, their Chief People Officer suddenly resigned after only a month, leaving behind her a scathing review on Glassdoor. The CEO’s response to this C-level’s review exhibited textbook definition narcissism when he charged the People & Culture team with being more diligent in finding ‘the right people’ because it was clearly an issue with this C-level person as he gave zero credibility to anything she had to say, only pointing fingers elsewhere. Sad, disappointing, unfortunate… Unfortunately, their success so far has more to do with the culture of the people that comprises the majority of their talent pool and the fact that they are willing to burn through people to achieve whatever results they want at the expense of incredibly high turnover rate and employee morale and satisfaction. The company’s talent pool is comprised of mostly Latin American people, who are some of the most humble, grateful to have a job, hard-working people I’ve ever met. They tend to not challenge leadership and welcomed my arrival as someone who might have a chance to change their company culture…all things I didn’t know coming in the door but became very obvious when I started to share my concerns and observations. Not worth the time to get into the details on what a waste of professional effort it is to work in this environment day-to-day. If you are a leader, forget about it, you’ll be told what to do, how to do it, with no time to get anything done, questioned and put on the defensive every step of the way. My greatest disappointment is that I wasn’t able to truly champion any positive change for the people within my stewardship despite their incredible achievements in such a short amount of time. Truly humbled by their heroic efforts, positive, can-do attitude despite being in a losing unhealthy situation. I wouldn’t have resigned had I any possibility of winning in this environment and can’t imagine anyone else doing so either. If you’ve read this far and thinking of applying, you are nuts. If you are a current employee, trust me, there are so many better options out there and even if there was a pot of gold for each and every one of you, it wouldn’t be worth it. Sad reality, the place pays bottom of the barrel and only ‘the board’ will benefit from any eventual success. This place couldn’t be closer to a sweat shop. Steer clear…you’ve been warned! Can’t wait to hear the spin control response from this honest review…
