Essense Of Australia Reviews

Nearly 90 people walked out the door in a single year. Most of those roles remain unfilled. The people left behind are doing the work of two, three, sometimes four colleagues with no additional compensation, no acknowledgment, and no end in sight. This is not a staffing challenge. It is a slow-motion collapse. The Chief Creative Officer is the single greatest threat to this company's survival. She presents as warm and supportive until any real pressure arrives and then the mask slips. Blame is deflected without exception. Staff are gaslit when they point out that her own directives caused a problem. She approves project plans and reverses them without warning, then expects identical results on the same timeline. She dismisses the expertise of every person she hired, micromanages to the point of paralysis, and has created an atmosphere of fear so pervasive that people are afraid to do their jobs. She is the main reason this company is hemorrhaging talent. The CEO is complicit through inaction. His intellectual brilliance is entirely wasted because he seems more and more disconnected and more critically, he refuses to hold his partner accountable for behaviour that is visibly destroying the organisation. Watching him say nothing while talented people are systematically driven out is its own kind of leadership failure. The CHRO has abandoned any pretense of serving employees and functions instead as an instrument of the very culture problems they should be solving. Staff have gone years without meaningful raises. One year, nothing at all. Meanwhile, leadership delivers company-wide addresses referencing luxury international travel and multiple properties abroad to a room full of people struggling to pay their bills. It is not tone-deaf. It is contemptuous.

You will be micromanaged. The most trivial decisions go in circles forever. Changing a lightbulb takes multiple people, meetings, reviews, second guessing and approvals. And that's before any solution ever gets presented to the owners, who have to review absolutely everything before anybody can do anything and who will flip your priorities on a dime at any time for any reason. Forget job titles and descriptions. Everyone's actual incentive is to look good for the owners, so your job is to make your manager look good to theirs and so on up the chain. You may hear that you're there to take initiative and contribute when you're hired, but you'll sooner or later realize everything you do will be shot down or changed beyond recognition as top leadership does whatever they were going to do anyway. You'll see it in the enormous amount of project management going on. If you think to yourself, "this is not normal", that's because it isn't. Every last nit is a task and a box to check off, even though the constant second guessing and changing priorities means most schedules fall apart anyway. Office politics aren't out in the open but very real. The high turnover encourages long termers to form cliques and hoard responsibilities and knowledge to protect their job security. If a clique feels whatever you're doing threatens their sense of ownership, you will get buried in passive resistance. It's the kind of environment where toxic people thrive as long as they can keep a tight circle of allies around them. If you just need a job to phone it in 9-5 and follow direction, this is for you. If you have competence in whatever your field is and you expect to have the autonomy and trust to do what you were hired for, that is not happening. Go elsewhere.