Canva’s office in the gentrified inner-city Sydney suburb of Surry Hills has been hailed as one of Australia’s best places to work, with a culture that attracts 300,000 job applications a year. But when David* was called in for a meeting and told he’d fallen into the lowest-ranked group of employees at the company, it felt anything but.

“It just came out of nowhere,” David says, whose name has been changed to protect his identity.