Checkout.com

• In the past, a "fun" culture.
• Still lots of great people.

Not a coincidence most of this has coincided with the arrival of the CHRO.

The culture has been decimated from the top down, replaced with an "us vs them" mentality between the lower rungs and senior leadership and performative management theatre.

• Faux transparency. Lots of candid, "open" communication from the leaders, while laying off swathes of people under the guise of performance reviews.
• The performance review process has been turned into a farce, where managers have no power to accurately appraise their reports. Genuine high performers getting passed over because of the need to fit a normal distribution curve within small teams (a basic understanding of statistics would help).
• Layers of "politicians" have been installed as a buffer under the leadership, whose only role is to facilitate constant alignment meetings where feedback vanishes into the ether.
• Salaries have stagnated. Once paid quite well, now relying on the slower market to keep unhappy employees overworked and underpaid.
• Employee satisfaction has tanked.

There's way more than I'm going to put down here because I'm just a bit tired of it all. Honestly, the company wasn't perfect before (real diversity problems, bro culture, poor tech) and some things are still okay (people trapped in the job because of the economic climate, tech is "ok"), but it's a real toxic shit show now.

Stop blaming external factors for what is entirely within your control.

Get a grip of the situation and recover what you can of the (good bits of the) former culture before there's nothing left to save.