Problematic - Employee Busuu Employee Review

There were several big red flags before I joined, but I did it anyway. I must have been charmed by the idea of working for an educational company. I regretted it almost as soon as I joined. There was no onboarding to speak of, management was hands-off to the point of complete disinterest, and internal processes were inconsistent or even completely conflicting. In my department people were having to find their own way with little guidance. Because management only communicated with people individually and there was no central communication across teams, people all worked completely siloed. I've worked in very large organisations where there was better collaboration than in this 200 people company. Because the communication was so fragmented and contradictory that colleagues in our department made up their own methods and rules instead of working together, often at the expense of others. It was easy for people to withhold information that they had received from management or only pass on those bits of info that suited their own interest. There was a lot of complaining, blaming and mistrust to the point that the atmosphere turned toxic. My team was deeply unhappy and 70% of them left the company in the space of 9 months. That should have shook senior management wide awake, but it was treated as a normal side of running a business. I don't know how many (ex-)employees need to tell them that there is a serious lack in direction (due to poor/absent management practices and accountability) in the company before they take it seriously. With every bit of criticism on leadership, Busuu's straw man arguments are that they are a "people first" company with a "culture first" hiring practice. Sounds great in theory, but Busuu has no real checks on how people are managed. In my department, senior management had back to back meetings on individual projects and people management was only a very distant second priority. Yearly reviews are there for show, nothing is done with those. There is no career planning or guidance in place. Busuu went into a poorly planned hyper growth in 2022 that became a huge strain on both existing and new employees and it clearly hadn't thought through how all these new people were all going to be onboarded and managed. They didn't learn from that experience nor the huge layoffs that followed.