Headspace Reviews

Here's the real talk from someone who's been here many years and LOVES the product, loves the founders and loves the company’s mission: the changes in the last couple years have made even me (a Headspace super fan) question whether or not I can stay here. This company has lost all sense of decency and purpose to its employees and customers. The short story is that there is horrible new leadership, scatterbrained and constantly changing priorities, no strategy (just reacting to whatever Calm is doing) so it's a chaotic work environment where they don't give you the support you need to do your job while they constantly add more work to your list, don't pay you more, while they keep telling you how important their employees are and how the mission is to improve the health and happiness of the world...as if that is a good reason to exploit their workers. If you want the full story... This is a business and no workplace is perfect. You can't expect headspace to be zen just because it's a meditation company. Work stress will exist, but the problem is that bad leadership and bad business practices are resulting in more chaos and work stress than is necessary...they are creating needless fires to put out constantly. And it's wasted effort because we're not actually meeting business goals (which change constantly) AND we're not even focusing on customer needs (we're only focusing on random executive whims...based on no data or strategy). We are pretending that we're still an early stage start up and using that as an excuse to cover all the ineffective/inefficient and toxic business practices that we're too old and too established of a company to still be engaging in. Headspace punishes competent people. If you want to succeed here, don’t be good at your job. In fact, don’t actually DO your job. Just tell other people to do your job for you. Leadership has no concept of what different departments do. So incompetent people/teams get a pass and their people get promoted as long as they keep saying yes to every shiny new object the leadership team wants to fixate on. And they love to run at new, conflicting projects all the time. Oftentimes in the middle of an existing project! And they won’t give you guidance or clarity on roles or expectations. There’s so much incompetent business practices, misalignment and wasted effort here. And leaders will blame you or go back on things they approved when it doesn’t go well. So the motivated, competent people get overloaded and burned out cleaning up other teams’ messes repeatedly.   There’s been a wave of middle- and lower-level managers who have quit (we've been losing talent over the last year) and many were actually running headspace behind the scenes and not getting much credit for it. The work they were responsible for is now pushed to those of us left behind and I’m seeing now how difficult it was to keep meeting unclear expectations without any support. Burnout is guaranteed. The toxicity starts at the top. In the last year, the new CEO brought in her c-suite of “yes people” who don’t actually have any understanding of how the product works or how to lead people (and have made no effort to learn). When we listen to her talk, it’s obvious she has no idea about the company’s approach to mindfulness or even what we offer on the app. she never interacts with the product team. We haven’t had a CTO since last summer. CEO likes to talk about being data driven and using AI/machine learning but our product doesn’t do what she’s talking about— and it won’t for a while. (From what I hear from others, she has a habit of speaking about topics that she doesn’t actually live out or know enough about.) I've seen many examples of how she's built a culture of fear and doesn’t meaningfully interact with teams, so my experience isn't an isolated incident. She puts on a kind show during our company all-hands but in the actual day-to-day, she didn't make an effort to understand different teams, get to know their pain points and opportunities. I really wanted to give her a chance and see her succeed. but it’s been over a year of this bad leadership that's steadily getting worse. It has trickled down into people at lower levels feeling pressured to meet unrealistic expectations which results in sloppy, rushed work that just creates more work to undo.   It certainly wasn’t perfect before the wave of Intuit leaders came. there were definitely some bullies here masquerading as mindful leaders but some have left the company and one of them just moved home abroad. But at least a few years ago it felt like leaders were genuinely working toward improving the product for our customers. The new leaders who joined haven’t taken the time to understand our people, our product or our audience. So they’re bumbling around shouting orders based on no strategy with no accountability and not setting teams up for success.  Leaders change their minds about things they previously approved. And you’ll find out through the grapevine because they won’t tell you directly and they won't even be clear about why changes/decisions are made so you can't figure out what you could do to improve.. Some people get unwarranted promotions while others who produce great work are bizarrely demoted.  The company is now focusing solely on growing and appeasing investors (which I understand), but it’s completely confusing because the strategies are bizarre and inconsistently applied and at odds with the company’s stated values. Leaders are so butthurt about Calm’s success and trying to copy everything Calm is doing (but doing it so innefficiently and ineffectively). Are we a mindfulness company? A meditation app? Entertainment/content? Health? Wellness? Who's our audience? Who are our competitors? Ask a different leader, you'll get different answers. That's because we don't actually know who we are anymore. Attrition is high. They keep saying it’s “normal” for a fast-growing company. They’ve been using that excuse for almost a decade. But Headspace is not a new company anymore and you can’t keep hiding behind that excuse to justify bad business practices. Teams don’t know what we do/don’t have budget for because annual planning is a joke. And if you want growth and development opportunities, you won’t find it here. No growth or career development prospects (unless you're one of Cece's friends from Intuit). They do employee surveys and we keep telling them the same feedback every six months. Nothing changes. It’s all just a show to make it seem like they’re listening.  Managers at all levels of the company leave quickly (most barely last a year) so you’ll be stuck in an endless loop of having to prove your value to a revolving door of VPs and C-suite leaders that the new CEO is connected to . We used to have a chief business officer — she lasted about 6 months. But don't worry, we have an old colleague of the CEO ready to step in! Our B2B team structure changes every couple months. It’s unclear who does what. We used to have a VP of marketing who was great. Left after about 10 months. But we've got a new CMO now and don't worry, this time things will be different! (sure, sure) Many of the new leaders coming in don’t even go through a formal hiring process. We just all of a sudden get a memo about a new c-suite leader and I wonder why (even though we say we want a diversity of people and perspectives) we never even opened up the job to a variety of applicants beyond Cece's connections. It’s because they don’t actually want to open up the pool to talented people. They just want people who’ll agree with them.  There are a few (and I mean a FEW) fantastic people at the c-suite level, and the founders Andy and Rich are great. but they are the exception to the rule. And there’s only so much that a few good people can do when the toxicity from the majority has trickled down into all levels across all depts.  HR is nice but oblivious to the reality that other teams don’t function in the rose-tinted world they do. The “unlimited PTO” is a joke. There's too much work to do that if you try to take PTO, you'll be punished for it by having to do extra work when you come back because now you have to undo the shoddy work they did while you were out. They just hired a couple diversity directors and that’s been a good move but many leaders here aren’t taking the importance of diversity upon themselves. they think that all they have to do to be an ally is just attend a training or say that they’re "learning," and make sure we have a diversity person as part of our headcount so they can make that person do all the work on behalf of the company. Or pass off the work to a few leaders at the company who were willing to shoulder the burden for everyone else. But a few of those leaders have left now too... They have one leader on the c-suite team who joined the company (also one of Cece's connections from Intuit) and it feels like they're using her as "proof" that they care about diversity. Immediately after she was hired, she started talking about how diversity matters at headspace which was weird because she was brand new and hadn't actually had time to understand the state of diversity at Headspace. But it seemed like the fact that she was handpicked from Intuit to replace a former leader (who also left after barely a year here) might have incentivized her to say good things about Headspace's diversity efforts, even though she didn't know anything about our experience as people who weren't brought on from Intuit (and don't have her title+salary). I really hope they're not going to continue to point to her as proof that they care about diversity because that's just another mask for deeper problems. And she deserves better than that. All of us on the team deserve better than that. We’re losing talent because leaders are resting on their laurels and keep making excuses for themselves. Headspace is still afloat because mindfulness is actually beneficial and the meditations are actually good. So that’s masking problems and helping leaders get away with no strategy, poor decision making and bad leadership practices.