Unity

At Unity, it really depends on your manager when it comes to work-life balance. Some managers are really good about it, while others are not so much.

The company's leadership team has demonstrated consistently poor communication skills, resulting in a lack of direction and confusion among employees.

Benefits have been frequently removed, making it difficult for employees to rely on them.

Employees have even experienced pay decreases in the form of lost monetary benefits and pushed-back promotion cycles.

The culture promoted by Unity's leadership feels disingenuous and is only prioritized when it aligns with their agenda.

Unity lacks a clear company direction and has shown a lack of focus, jumping from one thing to another.

High-level management has been ineffective and detrimental (calling people f idiots) in engaging with the public and making decisions in good faith.

Team siloing is a persistent issue, creating a lack of collaboration and communication among departments.

Instead of dealing with the issues causing siloing and duplication of work, leadership just cuts the duplicates and continues to let the reason why the problem happened unaddressed.

The company has undergone constant restructuring, which damages productivity and established relationships among employees.

Unity has laid off individuals with years of experience, resulting in a loss of deeply knowledgeable employees with institutional knowledge.

Unity has shown a persistent dismissal of valid concerns and a tone-deaf approach to messaging.

Unity consistently prioritizes punishing people for how they criticize things. Instead of being concerned that frustration has reached a boiling point, they are easily distracted and emotional with how things are conveyed. They fixate on how a message is delivered and don't focus on the content of the message.

They frequently operate around feelings and emotional trends, and not data.

With trends, the company has a demonstrated history of chasing trends, for example, the metaverse and now AI.

Poor communication skills among leadership: Leadership should prioritize improving communication with employees through town halls with open forum question periods, nonscripted answers, open forums, and surveys that have action items as a follow-up. Additionally, the company should invest in communication training for high-level leaders.

Frequent removal of benefits: Leadership should involve employees in decision-making with the removal of benefits, and where possible allow flexibility and work to understand the impacts of benefits removals. For example, making sure they aren't used for any important healthcare.

Disingenuous culture: Leadership should focus on creating a more authentic culture by empowering employees and valuing their contributions. This can be achieved by offering more opportunities for feedback and implementing a culture of transparency and accountability, especially at the executive level.

Lack of clear direction: Leadership should work to establish a clear company direction by setting specific goals and communicating them effectively to all employees. The company should also provide more opportunities for cross-functional collaboration and ideation to ensure alignment and focus across all departments.

Ineffective high-level management: Leadership should prioritize improving public engagement by increasing transparency around the company's decision-making process. Additionally, leadership should implement a more meritocratic approach to hiring and promotions.

Team siloing: Leadership should work to break down silos by fostering more cross-functional collaboration and communication between departments. This can be achieved by creating more opportunities for team-building and knowledge-sharing activities and having more structured sharing and communication across units.

Frequent restructuring: Leadership should minimize the impact of restructuring by providing clear communication about changes and how they will affect employees. Additionally, the company should prioritize retaining institutional knowledge by offering training and transition support to affected employees, or by looking at ways to retain people with deep institutional knowledge.

Layoffs of experienced employees: Leadership should work to retain experienced employees by being collaborative with finding financial solutions, such as restructuring pay across employees, including executives, to retain key individuals. The company should also prioritize retaining employees with institutional knowledge to minimize the impact of turnover.

Dismissal of valid concerns: Leadership should prioritize listening to employee concerns by offering more opportunities for feedback and implementing a culture of transparency and accountability to avoid continuously sinking morale.

Trend-chasing: Leadership is late chasing trends. They should prioritize staying more up-to-date with things and not be as reactive. If they are going to be reactive, they need to move quickly and prioritize fixing technical or development-related blockers that prevent speed.

Delayed promotion cycles: Leadership should prioritize creating more transparent and meritocratic promotion processes by offering consistent opportunities for feedback and evaluation. The company should also establish clear promotion criteria and timelines to ensure that employees have a clear path to advancement. Currently, it is based on very ambiguous questions that aren't highly received.

Suppression of communication: Leadership focuses on how things are communicated, and not the content of the message. They also used a vaguely worded code of communication to get rid of people whenever they feel like it. This leads many people to not feel safe sharing their feedback about things or asking questions. This is a hostile environment that is not conducive to growth or communication individually or across teams and is the type of thing that plants a seed of destruction in the company for the quality of communication.

Turnover and data: The company doesn't seem to do a good job or any job of trying to understand how often or why people leave. It seems to make little effort to improve itself to retain people. This damages productivity and prevents the build-up of valuable institutional knowledge and expertise from being captured and used. This can be improved by being more metric-oriented, making action plans based on data, and being transparent and communicative about what you're doing and why it matters. Hopefully, this ties into employee concerns and helps the feeling of accountability, transparency, and other values the company (used to) wants to aspire to like "in it together," "be bold," and "best ideas win." How can the best ideas win if we are making decisions not based on anything except emotion?