Pros
The best benefit you can get out of working at LifeStraw is that you get to experience and see in real time the cause and effect of poor leadership. The only other pro is that the benefits are actually pretty good.
Cons
All problems (and there are a lot) point to one thing: Poor leadership. Poor leadership is tolerated and sometimes even rewarded. When something goes awry and it’s leaderships’ fault, they often have amnesia about their poor decision making or they will blame team members. They will preach during a meeting about how it isn’t about who is at fault, about how it's just about coming together with solutions and a path forward. However as soon as the door closes behind you, they will call you expletives and names. Some members of leadership even have group chats to do this. And their group chats do not stop at your performance but will also include how you look and how your cellulite is gross. Their group chats are a depository for name calling. They constantly blame everyone for the lack of growth, missed sales targets, production issues, but they are incapable of looking inwards to blame their own terrible leadership. They will say they want something to change and it ends with them saying it, zero action. Their leadership style seems to be willing something into existence by purely just saying it, instead of taking actual action and adopting processes to enact change. Every decision and action must be meticulously documented in order to CYA. Members of leadership will not hesitate to point the blame to anyone and everyone other than themselves. This is a company that purports to do so much good for the world yet internally, their ethics and morality do not match. This is why leadership tolerates racist comments from board members while being in Kenya to deliver humanitarian support. This is why leadership tolerates sexual harassment (as long as they are the harassers). This is why the company has numerous whistleblower hotline calls against them. And never any real, meaningful changes. The toxicity of the place is apparent with the turnover. By my count, 14 people have quit since 2023 and 9 of those quit without another job lined up. It takes a lot for someone to jump without a parachute. Those that quit spanned many different levels of the organization, so problems span the entire company. 14 might not sound like a lot, but when the office has 20-ish employees, it is a major red flag. A red flag that is simply ignored. A normal organization would take each leave as a lesson and certainly enact change when the drip becomes a firehose. But not LifeStraw. People quitting was described once as “expected” and the attitude is generally “meh, we were going to fire them anyways, so at least we saved money.” That is pretty on par with how they reacted to the glassdoor reviews. Instead of taking the negative reviews as a lesson to enact positive change, they reacted by flooding it with fake positive reviews. Fake changes for fake leadership.
