Exhausting.The good things• In-house batiste was free.
• Shoe discount.
The challenges• Constant low morale rhroughout the office. Everyone quietly acknowledges their misery while putting on a fake smile publicly. You're expexted to be positive all the time.
• Perks being rescinded (flexible working arrangements & no pay rise mandate in April 2024).
• People talk behind your back.
• Little to no opportunities for development or department transfers deapite Development Dollars initiative. It's extremely hard to meet the criteria to acceas funding due to sparse scheduling of workshops you must attend and high workload not allowing you the time.
• Department and Line management play favourites- you won't get promoted or recognised if you're not one. Even if you kiss a** and burn yourself out trying to prove yourself.
• For a company who values "celebrating success", many hard working employees feel apathetic and frankly cynical because any recognition that is shared is just between office cliques. Not genuine at all.
• Junior-Mid level employees are overworked, undervalued, and underpaid by industry standards.
• Junior-Mid level employees train their frankly unqualified line managers and continually get taken advantage of for their good work ethic.
• Mistakes and missed budgets are punished, you'll feel like dirt at times. Upper management and the board have some KPIs which are too high for a post-COVID, recession bound economy.
Unfortunately MFG is becoming more of a toxic place to work each day. A fancy rebrand, new work "social media" platform, staff discounts, and free coffee (for now) isn't enough to raise morale or retain employees. Those things are nice, but they won't keep a roof over heads and they don't really help people feel that good about soming to work.
There's just a lot of PR talk to make things seem like sunshine and rainbows but employees can see through the farse.
Junior-Mid level employees should be paid more for all the things they endure. This is across all departments at head office, the DC, and retail stores.
At this point, there's nothing to suggest. Being retail, this company exists to make a profit and unfortunately employyes suffer in order to make that happen. I hope they don't resort to redundancies to meet their targets. I sincerely hope things inprove at MFG, I've heard that employees used to think the culture was great and that they felt looked after. I never experienced that.