My time working at Propeller began with immense support from my performance manager, exciting collaboration, and more career growth opportunities than I could shake a stick at. However, it rapidly spiraled into the most toxic job in my professional career as a direct result of poorly evaluated decisions made by senior leadership.
Toxic Environment Red Flags:
• Propeller senior leadership conducts operations using fear-based tactics and cryptic threats that creates a turbulent and hostile work environment.
• Senior leadership feigns that feedback is encouraged and welcomed. This tactic, in reality, is used to pinpoint “the undercurrent”. Don’t ever provide company feedback that vaguely resembles constructive criticism in writing while employed here, or else you will face swift retaliation.
• I’ve heard from others that employees are reprimanded and not given adequate reason as to why.
• Lack of BIPOC employees despite touting DEI values
• Bluntly, leadership unabashedly lies in attempt to save face to make up for their lack of communication, time management, and empathy for employees.
• Communication towards the end of my tenure was abysmal around critical aspects of my job’s role. Any basic (and essential) questions I asked were met with the assumption that I was incompetent and needed to be closely monitored. It was safer to just fly under the radar, not ask questions, and hope to not be targeted next.
• Frequent rumors of unethical interpersonal behavior among leadership created a very disappointing work atmosphere (e.g., drinking buddies get promoted over more qualified employees in an obvious way)
• Countless unproductive meetings for the sake of increased oversight and micromanaging
• Dedicated and qualified employees that contribute consistent value to the firm are turned down for advancement while unqualified employees that exhibit toxic "hustle" culture behavior are promoted.
• Crushing emphasis to churn out low-quality work and cut corners wherever possible for the sake of profit
• Expectation to work during vacation/PTO time. Boundaries are not respected and met with retaliation and hostility. As a result, you become too afraid to set necessary boundaries and experience burn out and out-of-character, low morale.
