It’s disheartening to see how the company is parading very noble concepts like mental and physical wellbeing at work. I joined Gympass thinking that I could make a real social impact on the professional world, however, I shortly realized that those concepts were only praised externally, so that employee wellbeing is important only when it means revenues. Gympassers spend their life praising concepts like retention, employee satisfaction, stress reduction, and the importance of workplace wellbeing but none of these notions are applied internally (i.e. When I opened up to my manager about having anxiety because I felt my job was unstable he proposed to terminate my tenure as a solution “for my wellbeing”).
Leadership either acts as you don’t exist and lack basic manners (which means they will shortly get rid of you) or they open up and will share personal opinions about their teams. I often listened to my manager complaining about the lack of intelligence of their employees and mock their personalities. This created a very negative and toxic environment where trust and respect were non-existent.
If you don’t comply with the culture you are very easily identified as a toxic person and the company will most likely let you go on the spot. As well, if you are no longer needed, managers make the work environment so tough that you naturally become toxic. Generally, the concept of “being toxic” is used against employees rather than being used as an opportunity to welcome feedback and improve upon.
The lack of transparency is so embedded in the culture that senior managers will say anything to serve their purpose. Nonetheless, the nepotism and favouritism in the company are so strong that most promotions happen because of the laddish culture some managers have established. On the other side, if the strategy changes (and it seems to change way too often) and you don’t serve a purpose anymore, they will let you go on the spot. And when I say on the spot, I mean that they will ask you to vacate your desk on the same day, without a handshake or the opportunity to say goodbye to your colleagues - which shows that the company has a cowardly way of not wanting to take accountability for its own decisions or simply deal with the consequences of their choice. The company re-structured internally so many times that it ended up having a very odd ratio of senior leaders to employees, where sometimes a managing partner/director is only responsible for no more than 3/4 entry level/junior employees.
There is very little money invested in proper resources for the team: laptops break down, licenses take weeks to be provided etc, which makes it very difficult for some teams to hit targets. The worst part is that the resources allocated usually match the level of seniority in the business meaning that the higher up you are the better laptop, phone etc you get, and this creates a sense of frustration and discrimination among employees.
HR is not independent. Personal strings outside work make it very difficult to trust the department and raise issues - I would expect no personal involvement (from friendship to more) from such positions.
The exercise of meritocracy (one of the core values) is also a big red flag at Gympass, I have witnessed the top team performer:
• having to fight for a promotion for 3 months
• Being told that if the promotion didn’t serve the purpose of the manager it wouldn’t necessarily happen
• Ultimately being promoted after discussing the case with 3 different senior managers - the promotion should have come with further responsibilities which never happened
• Overperformed for the following 6 months
• Was promised a further promotion to lead a team
• Let go after two weeks of the promise
