Where do I begin?
Management (in Marketing dept.): With the exception of a select few people, I found them to be two-faced (read: very fake nice) and do not have good work/life boundaries--thereby, you're expected to also not have good work/life boundaries.
Personal growth: Not a priority for management at all. You're a cog in the machine. When it comes to promotions, they are exclusively for management "bootlickers" (whether they work hard or not) and “yes” people. Others who are great at their job and sincerely work hard are not rewarded and are generally overlooked. Management keeps a literal “high-potential” list.
Work environment:
FBL is “Churn-and-burn” when it comes to new creative and/or marketing campaigns, because no one ever says “no” to the Sales/Management teams or even “could you please wait a day or two?” If you work here, you won't have the autonomy to say no either.
Everything is super-high priority, ALL the time. It's all an emergency, no matter how arbitrary. There's no time to be thoughtful about your work, even creative work.
Throwing away and and re-doing work is the norm here, because projects constantly change. It doesn’t matter how much work/time/effort you’ve already completed on a certain priority. Long term, this is extremely exhausting and frustrating.
Workloads are heavy and practically unmanageable 85% of the time, and there is no personal autonomy to say no or ability to ask for help or even to ask to delegate to someone else. Burnout is high and it's a "do less with more" environment.
General work environment is very inflexible (this may have changed since I last worked there, but I doubt it). For example, you could go to dr. appts and such, but you needed to be in your seat during work hours (8 a.m. thru 4:30 p.m.) and you’re not leaving before 4:30 pm—it doesn’t matter if you worked 16 hours the day before and are salaried, for example. If they let you go home early say, the day before a holiday, it was like, 3:45 or 4. And then they acted like they were doing you some HUGE favor and that you should be super grateful.
And, finally, the toxic positivity. Even though working here sucked, the expectation was that you would have a good attitude and be happy/smiling about anything and everything that happened—no matter what steaming pile landed on your desk that day.
Bottom line: Please, don’t work here. I promise there’s something better out there for you.
