Save Your Mental Health and AVOID - Anonymous employee Refinery29 Employee Review

R29 does not practice what it preaches. They talk so much about the importance of women advocating for themselves and taking control of their bodies and mental/physical health, but when their employees do it, we’re told that we should just be grateful for the opportunity to be working there and that there are “limited resources.” In the past, they have published articles about the importance of work-life balance and the detrimental nature of a toxic workplace, but there is zero work-life balance there and the workplace culture is more than toxic. Bosses text you at 11pm, early in the morning, every day of the week including Saturday and Sunday, Thanksgiving, Christmas and Easter. Enjoy your “day off!“ Except you still need to constantly be checking email, writing something, publishing content, posting content on social platforms etc. The holiday calendar is abysmal, and you have to jump through 10,000 hoops to get a day off. If you are coming to R29 from a company with any semblance of structure, you will be shocked at how poorly it is run. The HR department is passive aggressive and only has the best interest of the company at heart, not yours. Upper management is terrified to stand up to executives, and the culture of quiet bullying trickles down from the top and seeps into so many parts of management. Higher ups (and HR) are desperately trying to make sure that people don’t find out how bad it is. People working 60, 70, 80, 90 days consecutively not having a day to themselves? That’s wrong. Offering only 5 paid sick days to full time employees? That’s wrong, and also well below the national average. People work from 9:30 to 6:30 (usually 7:00/7:30) and eat lunch at their desks. Nobody encourages you to have a life or interests outside of work. Everyone is competitive and only wants to promote themselves, and it’s not a healthy environment. Internally, it’s not about building women up, it’s about building yourself up so you can leave the company and be in a decent position to go somewhere that values their employees and their employees’ health. Please, look at these reviews. You may think you were offered your dream job at your dream company. It is all surface level. You are better off working for a company that actually cares about its employees, and actually practices its ethics and values internally. There is a difference between "the hustle" it takes to work in media and an office that literally doesn't care that people are getting sick over the hours they're having to put in. Working in media is hard! But there are media companies that take a lot better care of the people working so hard to make them great.