My advice to anyone considering an offer from RGA- Please take reviews like this seriously. Before joining, I read similar feedback but assumed it was exaggerated. In my experience, it was not. I would strongly encourage prospective employees to carefully consider whether this is the type of environment they want to work in. Based on my experience, I would not recommend R/GA to professionals in design, technology, data, or other delivery teams.
Extremely toxic work culture- Before joining R/GA, I had never even heard of "stress leave." During my time there, it became clear that it was not uncommon. I personally knew colleagues who raised concerns with HR about excessive workloads and a lack of managerial support. From what I observed, these concerns rarely resulted in meaningful action, with employees often feeling they had no option but to resign or take unpaid stress leave.
Favouritism is a significant issue- There were instances where individuals in senior positions consistently delegated their responsibilities to junior team members while facing little to no accountability. This created an unfair workload distribution and had a negative impact on team morale.
Very high employee turnover.- During my two years at the company, the Visual Design team effectively turned over multiple times. Seeing entire teams repeatedly leave within such a short period should raise serious questions about the underlying workplace culture.
A blame-focused environment- The culture often felt centred around finger-pointing rather than collaboration or problem-solving. My advice is to document your work and decisions carefully, as issues outside your control can easily be attributed to you.
"Client is king" culture taken too far. While clients are important, prioritising them at the expense of employee wellbeing is not sustainable. I have personally witnessed situations where client feedback was relayed to employees in an unnecessarily harsh and demoralising manner, often devolving into finger-pointing and personal criticism. There also appeared to be bias in how feedback was delivered- if you were not part of certain internal cliques, your work was more likely to be dismissed regardless of its quality.
HR and management felt performative-, I saw little evidence of meaningful action to address the root causes of the high turnover and low morale. The same concerns continued to surface without lasting improvements.
