-Benefits -
401k matching - only if the company makes enough money, otherwise no match. If there is a match, it is paid at the very end of the year, so you lose all the interest it would have been earning if they just matched as you paid.
Also, they force contribution. Even if you opt out, you will find yourself contributing by the following year.
Benefits are expensive and garbage. High co-pay. Lots of things not covered.
Bonuses - only paid if goals are met. Goals are unattainable so never met. As one other reviewer mentioned, the company hasn't been profitable since 2020.
- Culture -
Let people go but don’t back fill the spots, so then everyone else becomes overworked. Morale sinks. Their solution - let’s have a happy hour or “fun” meetings that are supposed to build morale.
There are way too many meetings. Every morning we have to have an “ultimate update” meeting. A 10 minute waste of everyone's time where we are forced to read announcements the company wants to push (often repetitive) and go over the company values. It feels like a cult when you first come and see it happening. Beyond that, there are weekly sub department meetings, bi weekly department meetings, daily recap meetings, planning meetings, retro meetings (in which you put forth suggestions to solve issues in a recently performed process, knowing that almost none of them will be implemented), etc ad nauseum.
Two of the company's promoted values are “family spirit” and “mutual trust & respect”. However these break down rather frequently. For example when I observed that my teams were overworked and I didn't see them being set up for success, I voiced my concerns to a vp. The response was that my suggestions were not what's best for my team and we will not only keep doing what is tanking morale, but double down and accelerate the changes that are negatively impacting the team by overworking them and setting them up for failure.
Later a different leader suggested that we host (you guessed it…) a pizza lunch for the team to try to improve morale.
People First. The company tries to put all of its leaders through a training model based on the book called “People First”. It stresses servant leadership and (directly from pg 15 of the book) “people first-not profit first”.
Senior leadership do not espouse this. It is all about profits first. Do you think the C suite guys agreed to lower their annual pay and forego their bonuses so that people didn't have to be laid off? Think again.
Production first: The ACTUAL mindset of leadership. My team was held to such a high standard of production that any attempt to actually have a team meeting for updates or training was impossible due to expected deliverables. If I pulled the team off of production for as little as an hour, they would not be able to complete their tasks for the week, which would be viewed negatively
Here is an example of what consumes the mind of leadership: Desk chairs. There are quite a few people who work remotely and only come to the office on Tuesday. The main office area doesn't always have enough desk chairs for the crowd of people who come in that one day of the week. Instead of ordering a few more chairs, they will come to different parts of the building (where people work in the office 5 days a week) and take their chairs when they are not at their desks. It wasn't uncommon for my coworkers to show up in the morning and find their chair was gone. Or that it had been replaced with a crappy broken one. We would go looking and find their original chair and bring it back. Only to find it missing again within a day or two. Unbelievable how much time and energy was wasted on desk chairs for people who work remotely 4 days a week.
- Professional/career development -
IDP - in theory sounds great to new hires. You're promised a quarterly meeting with your boss and career development. This is used as a cop-out where all responsibility is put on the associate. But a lot of times in order to develop professionally your manager needs to sign you up for things or invite you to meetings. Majority of managers just do the quarterly idp, save and close the doc, don’t look at it again, and therefore don’t follow through on their promises to help their people develop. Eventually, when your career goes nowhere, they will tell you it's an “individual” development plan, so it's on you to make it happen.
Also, this used to be a 45 minute long meeting, where some good exploratory conversations could be had between associate and leader. However shortly after the first or second round of layoffs early this year, the Ceo decreed that IDPs would now be 15 minutes. A true People First mentality, right there. I could barely get through the reading parts of the idp document in 15 minutes. It left me almost no time to talk with my associates and see how they were feeling about their career or their development.
- Promotions -
I Know of at least 4 people who have been promoted and promised a raise and then have had to pester leadership for 3+ months before getting said raise. And when they do get it, it isn't back dated, it starts when the associate finally wins the battle. So they miss out on 3 or more months of increased pay.
Leadership will change the title, they may or may not announce it to the department (more often than not it's not announced, leaving the associate feeling like their leader does not share in their excitement), and they will put off adjusting pay for as long as they possibly can. It's dirty and it takes all the joy out of the promotion when you have to constantly ask for the raise you were promised 2-3 months ago.
The compensation is terrible once you are promoted. Go from manager to Sr manager? $5k raise. Go from individual contributor to supervisor, you're lucky to make more than you used to since you no longer get paid for overtime.
- Leadership -
We went through 2 rounds of layoffs in the first quarter. After the first one, the CEO hosted a meeting where he gave a heartfelt apology and assured it wouldn't happen again. The second round came a month later with no apology or any kind of communication from the ceo. Since then they have been picking people off one at a time.
The company has failed to meet sales forecasts for at least the last 2-3 years. Have the people making the forecasts been held accountable? Of course not. They just adjust by letting people go and forcing everyone else that's left to take on extra work, for which there is no additional compensation or recognition.
Meanwhile the CEO is still making his big money, and posting about his extravagant trips all over social media. By all outward appearances, he wants to be a social media influencer and works very hard at looking hip and showing what a successful life he lives. At one point in time he was trying to hire a full time person whose job it would be to follow him around with a camera, developing content for his social media accounts.
Stop trying to be an influencer and run your company.
Upper management in the company is nepotism central. The C-level twins who run operations and merchandising are cold and always look ticked off. Other family members are in high positions in the company. It's a big circle that you'll never be part of, and they have no problem letting you feel it. Ironically, I recently went through code of conduct training at another company where they highlighted that it is a conflict of interest to hire a bunch of family members to run your company unless they are just the most qualified people. But even then you should be aware of what the appearance is to outside people. And based on some of the comments made by the CMO during a department meeting, I would wager that they were not the most qualified candidate at the time.
When it comes to lower management, the company likes to promote from within, which can be a great thing. However people are often promoted to supervisor/manager who have no business being leaders. No leadership skills developed after promotion and they were very bad at their overall job before being promoted. Instead of giving training/support they just let the team under them suffer. Sr leadership is either ignorant or turns a blind eye.
There are people who do not work. Just sit on their phones all day, or walk around talking to people in other departments. In my area there were 2 or 3 individuals who would stop working an hour or so before clock out time. They'd slowly migrate to the time clock and sit next to it for a good 30 minutes until it was time to punch out. Instead of reprimanding those people who are stealing time, they are allowed to continue on in their behavior, oftentimes corrupting the good workers who actually did work hard. Their supervisors do nothing to fix it and some will even attack anyone who points it out.
- Discipline -
It is nearly impossible to fire someone if you are a manager or director, thanks to the terrible “corrective action program” (cap). As a leader, this program ties your hands when it comes to fighting for your team. It works like this: you can discipline someone for one of 6 main categories. First offense is an informal warning. Then an official Write up (cap). Reminder 1, reminder 2, decision making Leave (DML - a paid day off to decide if you want to still work there), then if it happens again within 6 mos it's automatic termination. However, if at any point in the process you go 6 months with no incidents, your record is cleared and you start over in that category. This is where the system ties your hands: offenses in different categories don't compound. So, if you have an associate who is on reminder 2 for tardiness, and you want to terminate them because of the negative impact they are having on the team, you might think that if they did something else worth writing them up for, such as excessive absences, it would jump to a DML. But no, that would have to be an informal for excessive absence. And that would start the whole discipline cycle from the ground up for that particular category. So if you have a crafty associate, they can continuously milk the system, and disrupt your team in one of 6 different ways, as long as they don't get beyond DML.
I explain all of this to paint a picture of how frustrating it is when your whole team is complaining about an individual because they don't do their work to standard, or are frequently calling out and leaving the team in a bind. The system leaves the leader completely stuck when that person just changes their tactic and starts showing up to work 30 min late all the time. Then changes it to disappearing from their desk for 45 min at a time. Even if they are working their way through the cap process, you still have to document everything and send it to associate relations. The company acts like it is terrified of being sued as long as the person reports to someone below vp.
Now if you're a vp or C-level leader, none of those rules apply. You just point and the person is terminated. Saw it happen over and over. Rules for thee, not for me.
- Toyota/Lean -
The company preaches Lean methodology. One of the principles suggests that you should develop processes and run them at a slower level to discover the main issues. Once those issues are resolved, increase the load on the processes gradually and with each increase you solve the problems and issues that arise. However, the marketing and merch teams don't have patience for this and while the lower level leaders are still trying to work out the problems on the first level of implementation, the higher leaders get impatient for results and ram through the level of productivity that they want. This causes stress and terrible culture for the people doing the work. The very people they supposedly care so much about. Issues pop up continuously, but there is not enough time to sit down and problem solve and/or fix the issues, because the expected output is so great that there just isn't time. So the issues never go away, the desired outcome is never reached, and leadership blames the managers and associates.
The company encourages problem tracking and problem solving, also a lean practice. However when I tried to have a simple meeting about a problem that seemed pretty easy to solve, the leaders of the departments in question put me off over and over. One VP specifically asked me to reschedule the meeting for a given time on a given date. When I did that, this same person replied that they couldn't make that meeting time work, despite having just asked for it.
In the end, there is no cross-functional cooperation. It is especially bad in the merchandising team, who repeatedly just does whatever they want and don't seem to care how it impacts other departments. Even when they sign off on SOPs, they still do whatever they want.
- Buying reviews -
Don't believe all the 5 star reviews you see on here. One of the perks leadership will give is free tickets to the company suite at one of the professional sporting venues (Panthers, Dolphins, etc). You get to go, rub elbows with the ceo, eat free food, and enjoy yourself. This is supposedly to say thank you for your hard work. However, the next day you show up at work you'll find an email from the ceo. In this email he'll ask for a 5 star review on glassdoor if you had a good time at the game.
You'll also notice they only acknowledge the positive reviews. They ignore the negative ones. IN fact this one was forced to be taken down once arleady.
- Cheated -
Final thoughts from me… I was fired for absolutely no reason other than the company didn't want to pay me severance. I have never so much as had an informal warning about my performance nor about my attitude or communication. Two weeks prior to my termination, the very same individual who was firing me was telling me what a great job I was doing. The company was so dirty that they lied to me about me not being a good fit anymore, and told me I was done. I have asked 5 different people in various positions of power and departments inside the company to please explain to me what I had done to warrant being fired and all 5 ghosted me - including the company's associate relations department, and their HR department. Meanwhile everyone I talk to who still works there was told it was a restructuring…
If you think they care about you, think again. You are no more than a number.
Don't walk, RUN away from this company.
