Fremantle is the most cliquey company I have worked for in my life. There is a total lack of office culture and teams are essentially siloed. I was told that I was joining a "fun" and "social" team but no real effort was made to welcome me other than short 1 on 1 intros with my colleagues - there was no team morale exercise the entire time I was at Fremantle, no after-works drinks, no lunches, literally nothing - the only "team-bonding" exercise the entire time I was there was a drab birthday celebration where we stood around awkwardly eating cake for five minutes.
My managers were hostile with their feedback that their influence negatively impacted my mental health. I came to think that I was terrible at my job and was unable to complete basic tasks. It felt as if my manager was eavesdropping and going out of their way to learn about conversations that I had had with other team members and that they would talk about me behind my back in order to maintain a list of things that I had said and done that they didn't approve of. This eventually led to me feeling like I was working under a culture of surveillance where I was practically unable to say anything without my manager chastising me for it.
The workflow of my job was pretty simple and I felt like I had picked up the routines rapidly but my managers were extremely impatient and expected me to ace complex tasks within weeks of my start date and for me to essentially handle entire projects and quality control checks despite me being a junior member of staff. My team was highly uncollaborative and would effectively distribute segments of the project lifecycle to individual team members instead of working on them as a group effort like every other company I have worked for.
The entire time I was at Fremantle I do not recall receiving one piece of positive feedback. When I made mistakes, my managers would schedule meetings to criticise me, usually with little warning which instilled a sense of dread that I could be pulled aside and berated at any given time. This sensation, alongside the feeling that I was constantly being watched, negatively impacted by ability to perform.
I was out the door not long after joining Fremantle and the experience nearly put me off seeking another job in the industry and I convinced myself at the time that I had had a bad experience because I was the problem. Fortunately I overcame this career upset and am now working for another corporation in the industry where I have an excellent working relationship and friendship with my manager.
