Pros
- They definitely do hire the best. Their employees are their greatest strength and they have gathered the best in business to join. It’s not easy to find such great people across all the teams that can pivot at any second and try their absolute best to execute the strenuous demands. - Cat and dog friendly office. - A genuinely good product. Cats are truly benefitting from the ground level, individual employees’ hard work which is a great thing.
Kontras
- Upper management is blinded by greed. What they have achieved is never enough and they constantly want more, more and more. There’s nothing wrong with being ambitious when you’re one of the leading disruptor cat food brands in the U.K., but there comes a point where one must step back and look at the bigger picture. If upper management opened their eyes just that bit wider, they might be able to recognise that the reason the company is being ran to the ground is because of their own questionable decision making that has gone on. - Yes-men thrive, and anything less than that is deemed as being unable to keep up with the KatKin vision. The fact of the matter is, you hire people for a reason. What is the point of hiring the best when you only hear what you want to hear? - Management makes demands, not discussions. You are expected to pivot with no time to make safety nets should the quick change not work out. You warn management to set reasonable expectations and are instead met with stonewalling and no guidance or reassurance. And when things don’t work out due to the manager’s poor decision making? It is your fault and the blame is on you for not being able to execute a strategy that was messy to begin with. - No trust in their employees. Trust that the people you hire can do the job, it’s that simple. The lack of trust was, frankly, at times incredibly insulting. - Targets across all teams in the company are unrealistic. I’m not sure they know what the difference between what a North Star and OKR is. - The many and immediate pivots are framed as due to us being a small company and needing to make changes short notice. But being a small company doesn’t mean you have to make poor decisions. They use the small business card when it’s convenient for them to excuse their crazy decision making, but when it comes to trying to justify making employees work overtime with no extra pay, working weekends and additional office days, it is suddenly acknowledged we’re a large company and need to be like the big dogs out there. You cannot be both a big and small business at the same time. - Managers need people training. You are managing people, not robots. As much as you want AI to dominate your workforce, you are talking to actual human beings who do need to sleep, eat and see their families when they get home. I have left my meetings in tears at times due to the pure frustration of being blamed for factors that were outside of my control. - Poor communication and zero transparency from leadership. Teams are constantly kept in the dark about decision making. Information is relayed poorly and delayed by managers, then employees are blamed for not knowing things in time.