Brewdog - open letter on toxic culture from former employees

[ShirleyPhallus]

Very interesting this. An open letter from former employees has been posted to Twitter, to brewdog complaining of a toxic culture that has resulted in mental health and staff morale issues. Former staff point out a bullying culture from the top which left them feeling scared / worried with several examples of bad behaviour:

twitter.com/punkswpurpose/status/1402724680637747200?s=21

Brewdog have responded to this with their own letter to current staff asking them to sign this letter to say the culture is actually good?!

twitter.com/punkswpurpose/status/1402920597945044997?s=21

It strikes me that brewdog’s senior management is made up of “lads” who believe that any publicity is good publicity, but employees obviously don’t feel the same. I also wonder how many people feel like this about their own organisation though - so many companies talk about a brilliant culture but their employees don’t agree

Interesting, the CEO is always posting on linkedin about how humble he remains despite success

My guess is a lot of employees feel this way. Or at least something similar. But I find that no one looks for or acts on the treason employees leave and companies have high turnovers of staff. Nothing changes until the bottom line is adversely affected.

This doesn't surprise me in the slightest.

Interesting that the letter implies a sexism/misogyny element ('whether to believe women') but this did not come across at all in the media reporting of the story that I've seen.

I know someone who worked for Brewdog when they started up - before they had any bars and were focusing on brewing and building the brand. He's very discrete about what happened, but has boycotted them since and indicated that they're not very pleasant or honourable people.

The founder wrote a book on how to build a business and he came across as completely batshit.

My cousin worked in one of their bars and said it was an awful place to work.

I had the misfortune to work for a company like this after leaving university. It wasn’t enough to work hard, you had to believe, even when believing entailed doublethink. It was like a glorified MLM.

From their initial response letter (my emphasis):

“we have always had a high performance culture, we have always moved at speed and we have always focussed on growth. It is fair to say that this type of fast paced and intense environment is definitely not for everyone, but many of our fantastic long term team members have thrived in our culture. Our culture is built on rewarding and developing great people and focussing on growing our business”

I think we can all imagine what’s behind those euphemisms. And the only people who ‘thrive’ in these type of environments tend to be Yes-Men and workplace bullies.

I feel for all those former and current employees who have said their mental health has suffered

Wasn't Brewdog the brand which volunteered up a month's worth of employee tips to Mermaids a couple of years ago? Easy for head office to do...

DH has worked with this company in the past

At first he thought they were great but now he would agree with the employees, they pulled a number of dubious stunts and I’m glad he no longer has to work with them

Feel for the workers 100%