Inexperienced leadership desperately trying to be a grown up company - Anonymous employee Teamwork Employee Review

I appreciate you taking the time to write this review, though as the founder and CEO of a great company that I am really proud of, this hurts to read. I can understand from the review that you were likely let go due to our COVID-19 layoffs, and for that I am sorry. Due to the economic downturn, we had to let go of 22 individuals out of our 260 person company. This is never a decision I wanted to make, but after a lot of careful consideration, the decision was made to ensure our company can continue to be successful as we face some new unknowns. Free food is a tiny, but important perk to us as we believe it is a way to bring people together, and it is something we will continue. "The co-founders have never worked for anyone else" Dan and myself, as the co-founders, have both worked since we were 12, though due to our obsession with Teamwork, I can understand how it might come off that this is all we know. We actually started a consultancy out of college and ran it for 7 years prior to Teamwork. Our consultancy work was essentially working for other companies living project to project. "Unwillingness to take advice from people who know more than them" I appreciate the feedback that it seems that we aren't willing to take advice from others, and wish examples were shared so we can continue to improve on this. We strive to be a company where great ideas come from anyone even if you are an intern just in the door. We have a “pitches” system where ideas can be put in front of the entire company. We have two way anonymous feedback. We have a board and great advisors. We listen to and implement great ideas all the time. "A lot of senior staff went up in ranks due to their friendships with the co-founders rather than on merit." I am sorry to hear that you felt that promotions were made based on favoritism, as in reality we promote on merit alone - it's even one of our core values. "Or the likes of former local celebrities hired on name alone with egos that made them extremely uncooperative, hostile, and difficult to work with." Not everyone is going to get along but I’m sorry to read this. I don’t remember any feedback on this ever being brought to my attention. "Experienced leadership were brought on." Yes, we’ve added some great people to the company as we scale. This is normal. "The benefit package the company liked to boast and hire on is actually fairly standard for this industry." I don’t think we boast about this. Like every company, we list perks on our jobs page but actually don’t tlist everything. " Bonuses had been discontinued completely, and pay rises were tied to performance reviews which became a lot stricter and less fair." I would also like to clarify your point on our bonus structure. A year ago we changed from giving bonuses based on arbitrary targets the company sets to a more fair personal performance based scheme. When making this change, we gave a 5% pay increase to all staff, as well as rolled out a 10% share pool for staff. "Culture used to be a major selling point, with nights out being widely attended and enjoyed, but it began to struggle and fall apart and felt forced when the company culture was no longer in line with the corporate direction the company was going in, which is a direction it needed to be heading in if it’s to survive." Though it hurts to hear a lot of this feedback, I appreciate you leaving it as understanding these things will only help us get better. I'm afraid that a lot of what was mentioned are growing pains that we are working through as we grow from a small 50 person start up, to a more well established 260+ employee organization. It's true that we used to have less than 50 people and it was easy to have a night out for everyone. One time we had the entire staff take over the Guinness Storehouse in Dublin and run a free bar all night. But now we have 260+ people from all backgrounds and not everybody wants every event to revolve around the pub and running events for that amount of people requires logistics. We still run great events and try to mix up the format. People who have been with us for a while grumble that they miss the old days and so do I … but it is our ambition to be a very successful company and there are tradeoffs as we scale. That said, we will always have a great culture and stay true to our values. We take this seriously and recently hired somebody to work full time as our “People and Culture Specialist''. We also have a “Ministry of Fun” panel of staff who help plan fun events - so I'm confident that a lot of great things are to come on the culture front (even as we continue to WFH and increase remote staff). "The company’s outward image was extremely masculine, with very few women in leadership roles - even fewer after recent lay-offs." It's also important to acknowledge your comment about women in leadership roles. No company is perfect, we have much more to do but we are genuinely working on this by introducing new initiatives. Again, I know the redundancies were incredibly difficult for all involved, and I’m sorry.