Essence Reviews

1. Lip service - one very good example is during the lockdown. At the start of the circuit breaker, management said "new norm, lets be sensitive to everyone's situation at home" "lets not have lunch meetings" but meetings still happens. And when you bring this up to the leadership during town halls, reply is "yea. i am guilty of that too and i should stop it". Look, im not against having lunch meetings. I know its inevitable sometimes, but not 3 times a week? How about actually stop saying and start doing that? 2. Promotions - This is a place where its not what you do that matters, but who sees your work that matters. Fold a paper plane, color it, pour sparkly glitter over it AND THEN do a presentation with animation and tell everyone how colorful your paper plane is, that will give you a definite priority promotion over someone who actually crafts the plane out of pure hard work and made sure its aerodynamic. 3. Politically correctness - Town halls are always like the 9pm show where you see how politicians give non answers.

This place is a mess. There is no CEO since Kyoko moved to America. We are run by the opinions of 5 people, 80% of them come from South Asia. Decisions made are mostly based out of poorly formed assumptions of what we Essentials want or need. We want transparency, and you should be transparent with us all the time. Not only about the bad, but definitely about the good. Why should promotions in Q1 be kept quiet? Why do you shy the good ones away from recognition? Why are you not transparent about promotions being delayed over and over again? Some of us could have been promoted by now, but it's too late because of covid? Leadership is always scared about being looked at as the bad guy, there's nothing wrong in firing people. There's something wrong if you don't do it the right way, with compassion. When redundancies were made, did you ask if these people who were made redundant wanted to be put in touch with people you know who could be connected? In this climate, we need to stay more closely united, and all we understood was, "people were fired, we want to keep this private for them." Did they ask to be boxed in a corner? You think of yourself as a tech company - but tech companies like Airbnb (supposedly our client globally) had published (only with consent) the talent whom wanted to be registered. This is THE GOLDEN STANDARD of how we should treat our people - we should recognise them for all their work and help them find jobs through our WPP network and also our very own network. The quarterly performance checkpoints are an overkill = it actually demotivates people and does not excites them. The business keeps talking about wanting to be diverse, but they keep promoting Essentials who have not worked for many other companies or who are set in their own ways. The level of racisim we have been exposed to by our Global counterparts are not to be taken lightly. The only person in the Global Executive Leadership team who is Asian is our Global CEO Kyoko. How is this even acceptable? References to us being the "Wild Wild West," so "1950s", and some of the leaders being "cowboys" by a few of Global leaders is not what a being a global community all about. This is not normal, how can you continue to employ people who are not demonstrating the leadership principles? Sometimes I am even exposed to, "people should be grateful I am giving them my time." by Global Leaders. If your team is seen as a burden, why do you even bother being a leader? Not enough new business, most agencies are pitching 2-3 times a week at least. Essence only 1-2 a month at best.