When "meaning well" is not enough - Anonymous employee Hattaway Communications Employee Review

… meaning well does not mean behaving well. And meaning well certainly does not actively create a healthy work environment for non-leadership staff (those under director level), often referred to as "junior staff." The company has recently been a rotating door for its staff of under 20 people, mostly for its junior staff, and likely due to issues related to a toxic work culture where professionalism is under-practiced, as well as issues with diversity, equity, and inclusion. Historically, junior staff express to supervisors in leadership that they are overworked, under-supported, and coming up against other issues of a toxic workplace, while amongst themselves the leadership team discusses how junior staff members don’t know how good they have it. Even when supervisors in leadership say they want to support their junior staff, it seems they do not have paths of escalation they are comfortable using with executive levels of leadership, or paths that they feel confident will end in resolution. Junior staff are seemingly left with the choices of escalating by themselves, or not saying anything further. Most opt to not to escalate perhaps in part because historically those who openly ask big questions or directly discuss issues in service of positive change have been labeled “troublemakers” and/or complainers, and with a company this small, that perception from people in positions of power creeps into so much of the work experience. Adding to that, power dynamics at Hattaway seem to go unrecognized/unidentified by people in positions of power, and a lot of emphasis is put on “empowering” junior staff (who are often fresh out of school and for whom Hattaway is a first professional experience) to step up and have confrontational conversations directly with members of leadership who do not have a track record of listening and/or treating junior staff with respect or kindness. There seems to be a culture of snark and deflection among leadership when it comes to cultural issues and these same people in leadership seemingly hold the keys to professional growth paths and income, in addition to impacting whether work is bearable or unbearable in the day-to-day. The divide is strong between the leadership and junior staff experience, and trust does not seem to exist as a whole between these two groups. Another issue is that an interest in topic areas (such as DEI, people management, or workplace culture) is sometimes conflated with expertise - meaning you have inexperienced internal staff leading other inexperienced internal staff on efforts that in other companies are managed by people with a higher level of training, knowledge, and/or specialized practice. This can result in confusion, frustration, and leadership getting key transitional/organizational moments wrong in ways that negatively impact junior staff and the culture at large. This includes (but is not limited to) instances when non-leadership staff members of color appear to be lifted up by white members of leadership and put in positions to lead or be integral to DEI-based projects, initiatives, and staff conversations on which they did not want to take a notable role. In some instances, junior staff of color seem to express confusion as to what (if any) professional qualifications made them the right fit for these assignments in the eyes of leadership. Hattaway is an environment where everyone in leadership works on client work and there is no expert dedicated to workplace culture, internal DEI work, people management, and the navigation of internal conflicts or conflicts of interest. This is perhaps the genesis of the toxic culture: there are seemingly no checks and balances when issues trickle down from the top, and no one in leadership is equipped, legitimately empowered, and/or interested in openly identifying the patterns of issues that are consistently raised by junior staff members across the company. So nothing changes - except the faces of junior staff who come and go, leaving to find healthier work environments elsewhere.