An unfortunate downward spiral (wrt culture and the teams) - Anonymous employee WeWork Employee Review

2.0
Mar 14, 2024
Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

To some extent, they do care about their employees - a strong tactic to ensure employees keep chasing the imaginary carrot. The perks include learning and growth opportunities, healthcare, breakfast, transport coverage (to some extent). Not all of these benefits apply to all departments equally, which shoud be the first point of concern. A lot of people you meet at WeWork are lovely, especially those who have shared discriminatory experiences. The deepest connection comes with the most excruciating experience. The company, as a whole, is doing quite well - no matter how little they may actually be rewarding the true worker bees in the system. They party fairly hard. Honestly, not sure if this is a plus, but some may appreciate it.

Cons

The biggest red flag is the nepotism and favouritism that riots the office spaces. If the people at the top do not like you, you can forget about any sort of growth - and they can choose not to like you simply because you stood up for yourself (or someone else) in a sticky situation or because you challenged their 10-hour workdays (yes, 10 hours, while also working through your lunch break and while many employees travel from really far too, with no reimbursement on their travel). However, if they do like you, you can expect a lot of promotions, salary increments, performance/achievement related bonuses, awards and an "exclusive in" with their personal friend groups. Heights of absolute clique-ism - which makes you feel like you're in high school all over again! Second, there is pretty high attrition rate within the company, save for a few top guns mentioned above who have been around since the company was birthed. With more new people coming in, internal growth for an employee is killed imminently - they would rather hire someone at a higher position than promote a hardworker internally - and the disgruntled employee ends up having to train the new hires, which kills their spirit. The attrition also means that not everyone gets replaced, thus resulting in heavier workloads for the rest of the team, which obviously does not get adequately recognised neither through promotion nor remuneration. Third, managers face so much pressure from the top which trickle down onto their teams, that their empathy ends up at an all time nil. Several incidents include how some team members have had to take emergency leaves (think along the lines of accidents, sudden hospitalisation, family emergencies etc) and the managers have reached out to them for work related concerns, while making little to no efforts to understand the state of mind of the team member.

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WeWork Response
1y
Thank you for your feedback and the time taken to write the review. We offer all our employees industry-leading benefits and an environment where our colleagues feel both heard and valued. While we are often acknowledged as a great place to work via externally run and independent surveys, our employees and ex-employees, we continue to stay committed towards continuous improvement in all aspects of our business, and that includes the environment we offer our teams. We are proud of the speak up culture that we nurture and have several forums and avenues for employees to share feedback on a real time basis - employee surveys, office hours, skip meetings and our AI led engagement platform. What underscores all these listening tools, is that the feedback that is heard is followed up with action planning. Rest assured our endeavor is to build a strong and diverse management and leadership team to help us achieve our business aspirations and provide a best in class experience for our members and colleagues. We invest heavily in attracting, developing, grooming and engaging managerial and leadership talent. Coupled with this, we continue to build strong and independent people processes with the necessary guardrails to drive high performance, meritocracy and fairness. Our values in action, embedded at every stage across the employee lifecycle, helps us stay accountable and drive a high-performance and meritocratic culture. We have noted your perceptions and observations and stay committed to building a great place to work for our members and colleagues.

Explore other reviews about WeWork

5.0
Mar 16, 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Weekends off Solid structure that you couldn’t find in a normal cafe Base rate that would be equivalent to working a busy cafe with tips

Cons

Depending on location, the customer flow can be insanely heavy. Members tend to come multiple times a visit.

3.0
May 25, 2018
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

VERY cool HQ--beer, fruit water, and other treats on tap, free breakfast, amazing decor, lots of events and cool trendy vendors who bring free stuff--if you like to humblebrag via Insta, you'll love this place. Some cool people --celebrities come in and out, your colleagues are generally very attractive folks, there's a sense of excitement and true commitment to the work (borderline evangelism) depending on who you work with and what you do. Name recognition and valuation -- company is a rising star and it's worth having on your resume. A cool mission on the surface--bringing community together, helping people do what they love (making work a passion rather than a chore) through connection.

Cons

This place is like drinking from one continuous Kool-Aid jug. VERY cult-y and cliquey. You are either in or you're out, and if you're out, rather than cut you loose right away, they gaslight you. It's actually kind of shocking how many people I've seen be treated so poorly here, and perhaps no coincidence that they were folks of color. Kind of hard to find the down to earth people I did find. I enjoyed the Community teams and Security/Ops/Real Estate people I met, probably because they were constantly "hustling," but the HR team (the PEOPLE team, for goodness sake) and a lot of other "prominent" faces were consistently rude, with an overinflated sense of self and zero idea of how the WeWork "values" translate into behaviors/contributions from a prospective employee POV. You have to have been there since the start, or be prepared to ingratiate yourself, to get any traction in your professional development or career path. I was always shocked how badly my manager wanted to be liked, and how much they were willing to do to be liked, to get any kind of clout and/or promotion just bc they hadn't started out at WeWork as a community team member. Never mind that they were super qualified for their job. Pay varies depending on who you are; some people earn market value...some people very very much don't, and there doesn't seem to be any consistency that determines which is which. TGIM. Thank God it's Monday. Mandatory Monday meetings. Sometimes they circulate tequila shots. Is that a plus? Not sure. Summer Camp. Adult Summer Camp. With EDM, people in salmon colored shorts, and lots of loud rowdy entitled folks. If that's anything but a con for you, you probably belong here and godspeed.

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