This school has only been mentioned once in this reddit group (as far as I know), but given the fact that they are prevalent in both Osaka and Tokyo, and are looking to hire a bunch of teachers right now, I would like to warn everyone about my experience and things i've witnessed working at GLOBE english school.
I have never ever worked in a more toxic, unprofessional, and bigoted environment. The leadership, specifically Nao Kiyota, the CEO (although there are other people in management propelling this system headed by him), is one of the most exploitative and racist people I have ever worked with. Just to elucidate my experience here, I will divide this into three parts: the work environment itself, the dynamic of the workplace between employees, and the CEO's behavior.
- the work environment – At the time of my hiring, I was simply desperate for work, so I was just taking anything that would come my way, which is how I ended up working here. You can find better compensation from other companies because the pay is not good. The CEO has raised course prices for students this year, but no staff members are getting a raise, and according to long-time employees, haven't had any in years despite false promises. In fact, the amount paid for new hires is lower than ever before (¥220000), with a former employee telling me that they used to pay ¥250000+ as base pay. You are hired as a contractor with absolutely no benefits, so during Obon or Golden week, you are forced to take an unpaid break (be prepared for your income to drop significantly during those months). Oh, and if you call out because you're sick, he's going to cut all your hours for probably the whole week, even if you say you are fine, just so he can pay you less. You are specifically hired as a contractor so the CEO can fire you whenever he wants to, with no legal repercussions for him. He's notorious for providing part-time workers, specifically Black and Brown employees, with the most unstable and ridiculous schedules and making it so awful for them (giving them two lessons a day once a week or something like that), so you have no choice but to quit. If you do manage to get a regular schedule, your work days are from 11:30am until 9:00pm where you are teaching classes back to back with a 15 minute intermission in which you are expected to enter reports on what you taught that class, use the bathroom, and also be expected to have conversations with students in between classes to "create community." Additionally, the CEO schedules breaks so that most people's breaks are at the legal limit (after 6 hours), meaning that many teachers are tired and are unable to give students the kind of lesson they deserve because they haven't had a true second to breathe. Although we are supposed to be "teaching," we are really just doing activities from a textbook, and during training, they teach new employees that the emphasis is more on entertainment. So you're being paid a little above minimum wage to be an English-speaking jester for hours, teaching an occasional grammar concept or vocabulary word. There is also an expectation burdened upon employees to go "above and beyond" and to get involved in social media management, event planning, and more without any additional compensation for the added effort this takes on top of teaching 8 classes a day.
- dynamic between employees – To be honest, this has a lot to do with the environment and the precedent that the CEO sets, which I will expand upon later in section 3, talking specifically about him, but the environment he creates encourages severe crab mentality between employees. A few employees who quit told me that the CEO once "recruited" them into a secret group chat where the CEO chose them because they thought they were "special" and "had great potential" and wanted them to be their personal spy on other employees (of course with no pay increase lol) and to give reports on who is an isn't giving good effort. So staff members are encouraged to "tell" on each other with some sort of hope of being in the CEO's favor. Theres also definitely racism between native Japanese speaking staff against BIPOC non-Japanese staff but because the CEO is a racist himself these staff members feels free to easily do everything from micro aggressions all the way to awful statements about people of different races/ethnic backgrounds, making inappropriate comments on Black hairstyles, comparing BIPOC staff to one another just because they're the same race, etc. One example I can give you, due to it being done in the company-wide accessible Discord serer, is the horrible treatment of the Filipino department admin staff members. In a public channel, multiple times a week, both the members of leadership and the CEO orders and publicly humiliates Filipino admin staff members in condescending audio and text messages over mistakes usually out of their control as well as compares them to Japanese staff (which is supppperrrr racially toned) and how they need to "do better like them." There was a sort of recent audio message where the CEO basically alluded that if it were possible, he would replace staff members with AI robots, but can't because the "technology isn't there yet" and the company would "lose its color". All this being said, you are dealing with a work environment where racism is normalized, you're walking on eggshells because the CEO offers no job security, and you are afraid of the other employees around you in case they're a secret bootlicker going to rat on you. Super toxic environment to say the least.
- The CEO – In the previous sections, I have already detailed some examples of his behavior, but I want to expand more on him specifically. When you first meet him, he attempts to put on a friendly face and gives you lots of false promises on the work security, flexible scheduling, etc. However, as soon as you sign that contract, all niceties dissolve. Again, if you are a part-time employee or BIPOC (he has a prevalence in more severely disrespecting these teachers in particular), he is likely to mess with your schedule so bad you cannot make any sense of a livable income. For one teacher, he never scheduled classes on their contracted hours which they had extensively discussed and agreed to in writing beforehand. He would leave their schedule open, have all the slots filled with students ready to take lessons from them, and give their classes away to other teachers, then tell them, "It's a slow day, so stay home." The same teacher later on, would check their schedule at night before sleeping and see they were not on the schedule, so they assumed they were cut from the schedule and had no work. Then, the morning of, the CEO would schedule them full of classes and not give them any notice, and then would fire them and blame them for not coming into work, even though they had no fair way of knowing that they were scheduled. Another example of him going against the contract is his response if you are slightly late. Since we start opening procedures at 11:30, if you came in at 11:31, he would round your clocked-in hours up to 11:45, and you would lose money. Employees lost significant amounts of their income from this, even if they had delays that weren't their fault. This punishment system was nowhere in our contracts, and many employees argued against it to the point that the CEO got fed up and tried to "make an example" of one staff member by giving them a new contract with this punishment system included, saying that if the staff member doesn't sign it, they can kiss their job goodbye. And as mentioned in the only other comment extensively talking about the CEO, we start lessons at 12:00 so being one minute late has literally no impact on day-to-day functions whatsoever. The CEO also, as you can already tell from earlier examples, thoroughly enjoys humiliating people and making employees' lives harder on purpose. Once, he interrupted a female staff member's lesson by calling her and making her answer, even though she was mid-teaching, and started yelling at her in front of the student until the female staff member was crying and had to excuse themselves from their lesson, in which another teacher had to come and teach the student. Since there are multiple locations, if you as a teacher say location A is closer to you and better for you for any reason and another teacher says location B is more convenient he will send you to location B and the other teacher to location A just because.
He makes long voice note messages in the company discord in which he talks aimlessly, insulting different staff members for very negligible things. In the same company wide discord which again is public and everyone in the company can see it, a teacher couldn't make it to the cherry blossom picnic because their hay fever was so bad and the sakura trees were going to make it worse even after taking a anti-histamine, He responded with a long voice message angrily berating this teacher and for some reason also dragging in other staff members calling them "skill less" and other insults. Additionally, when he's upset at native Japanese staff, he often compares gaijin staff to native Japanese speaking staff saying that Japanese staff have higher expectations placed upon them because they "don't do x,y,z like foreign staff members" and they "don't understand what good work ethic is , but you guys do so do better" lol.
Students I worked with, especially long-time students (10+ years students), can tell the level of exploitation and harassment that the CEO exudes onto staff members. They notice when teachers' they love are being randomly fired, they notice how tired teachers are from working exhausting hours, they notice the bizarre insulting behavior from the CEO, and in some cases, they have dealt with him directly and also notice his attitude. They genuinely dislike the CEO and the way he treats his staff members, and only stay for the teachers they have close relationships with. So again, with all this being said, please do not consider working here if you are able to and save your mental and physical health. Feel free to PM if you have questions.
by Great_Eye3352