Pros
World's largest furniture company has a stable and varied business structure. You can be assured that Ashley will be around for the long haul. And job security is a real asset. This is due to a mixture of success by the company and under-staffing(more of that in the Cons). You will work closely with SVPs and even the CEO at times. Whether in meeting with them or preparing reports they use. You can be assured your name will get out there. Most of employees are driven, and hard workers. Promotion from within is very common Non Vacation Benefits are pretty good
Cons
Where to start? Under-staffing is an issue. Most jobs require employees to prioritize. Often the choice is which get done first and which get pushed to their deadline. At Ashley you are asked to put everything priority one (I am sure thats not unique to AFI) but you have so much on your plate you either have to work several late hours to meet the deadline or you just don't make it. There are projects I and my coworkers have had that just get dropped after months because we are not able to work on them. Often there is a misunderstanding with upper management on what is and isn't reasonable. Late nights are common. Ashley prides itself on hard work and going the extra step but taken to the brink. Employees who leave right at 5 every day are noticed. Employees who work an extra half hour, hour, two... will get noticed initially. After a while it becomes expected. Upper Management often works 12 hour days and half Saturdays (Not uncommon for a company) but will expect similar of their employees. As an accountant, the worst might not be the hours or pressure. Those are expected with the job. But the lack of accounting software. This is a multi-billion dollar company that uses excel as its primary reporting program. Excel can do some amazing things but when accuracy is expected from files that take hours to calculate, issues will happen. Most of your time updating is ensuring that everything pulled in correctly, files balance between each-other and troubleshooting the issues that occurred. Files frequently crash when new updates to Windows occur and sometimes you just need to wait for the system to open. AS400 is also very outdated. While effective, the way it interacts with excel can be very tricky. Overall many employees are over worked, under appreciated and in general burned out. Most are hard workers at heart but a breaking point comes when you put in so much time and effort to not feel appreciated and respected Vacation is pretty poor. 2 weeks for the first 5 years. 3 for years 6-10 and then every year after 10 you get one extra PTO day. Some holidays off but most of the major ones are one day. (Thanksgiving is off, Black Friday is not)(Christmas is, Christmas Eve is not).
