Company needs to improve. Especially with culture, leadership, and investment in employees - Anonymous employee Sonder Employee Review

On the surface, Sonder is an exciting place to work. The company has survived Covid, is growing, and is in a creative/fun industry. However, if you look below the surface, there are a number of things that need to improve including:1. Culture/Leadership, 2. Pay/benefits, and 3. Career progression / development. It is shocking the number of super qualified employees (those who have worked at Google, FB, AirB&B, Lyft, Uber, McKinsey/BCG/Bain, and many strong start ups) who have left over the last year because of the things mentioned above. It is telling that many of these folks chose to leave in the middle of a pandemic...reasoning that staying at Sonder was so toxic that they'd prefer to look for new jobs in one of the worst job markets in recent history. 1. Leadership/Culture - This commentary doesn't apply to all leaders, but does apply to the CEO and others. One issue was that there never was a set company-wide strategy. The CEO is very smart, but he's not visionary and could never articulate a strategy that the rest of the company could anchor against. This led to very inefficient OKR planning cycles (I was part of many quarters of OKR planning and it never got better despite feedback...), cross-functional mis-alignment, and team frustration. Another area where leadership and culture were off was in how leaders weaponized our company values. Values such as 'act like an owner' or 'be optimistic and grateful' were constantly mis-used. I overheard one company leader tell a hardworking and impactful employee that they needed to 'act like an owner' as a means to get them to work more/harder (even though many this person often worked 10+ hour days). I've also seen some of the most shining people at Sonder be told they aren't grateful and positive enough. This is extremely demotivating and creates fear and mistrust w/in the company. On the note of trust, many leaders micromanage like crazy (e.g. leaders going around managers to attack their direct reports by getting into the weeds of their work and criticizing them). It was easy to often feel like one's work was never good enough as one could expect leadership to find flaws vs calling out good work and offering to partner with employees to take their work to the next level. Episodes like these led to folks breaking down. More than once I saw colleagues come to tears because of how some of the leadership team treated them. Lastly, I need to call out the many demeaning comments that came from the CEO. One prime example was when it was clear that many qualified people were leaving, the CEO told the entire company that if anyone wasn't happy at Sonder they could easily go find a job in a big tech company. This was hard for many to hear as not everyone had the ability to just sign up and easily get a job from Google. 2. Pay/benefits - Sonder offers massively lower comp vs other comparable companies (e.g. those in similar industries, with similar $ raised, with similar revenue etc). Even before the pandemic hit, it was clear Sonder was banking on the fact that it was a 'cool' company to make up for the gap in their average compensation vs the market median. In addition, no perks were offered throughout covid (e.g. $ to help us furnish our home work space, paying for internet, etc) while many smaller/less well funded companies offered the same to their employees. Similar to leadership's comments above..it felt like the message was 'you're lucky to work here' vs 'we are invested in our people and retaining them'. 3. Development / career progression - tied to the comment on pay/benefits, the lack of investment in people also extends to one's personal growth. It took Sonder until Series E (!) to finally hire a VP of People/HR. At of the time of writing this there was no company approach to career development (e.g. outline of the expectations at reach level so employee's had clarity on what they needed to do to get promoted) etc. I know of many people, including myself, who were constantly promised promotions or higher levels of responsibility only to have that carrot dangled indefinitely. I never felt like the company was really invested in me, but more like I was just a body to get stuff done, which made the decision to leave all the easier. Sonder's leadership has received the feedback above more than once in the last year but not enough has been done. Company wide engagement scores are still way low vs industry averages as they were when these issues were first flagged. I am hopeful Sonder will take this seriously and improve. I'm confident that if leadership is more compassionate and the company truly invests in its people, the company will shine and be a staple in the hospitality industry.