Intern - Internship Ferrero Employee Review

Great atmosphere and compensations given

A lot of work to do

-Great products -Consistently high financial investment in the United States for almost a decade -Total compensation is competitive, relative to other Food / FMCG / CPG -By and large, healthy culture in terms of communication and collaboration. Low number of difficult individuals -Low level of red tape: easy to champion new ideas and intiatives

-Ferrero hugely prioritizes male European-nationals in leadership positions at the expense of more localized and qualified talent. -There are few-to-no female and/or POC employees above the middle-manager level globally. -The manufacturing group has astonishingly few leaders below the age of 40. -Generally, European leadership looks at American factories and cultural norms with barely-disguised disdain, even though it manufactures the most volume. -Ferrero's norms around talent management make it difficult to advance, even with stellar performance. The company will often already have a candidate selected and approved before they even post a job internally, and often, they don't even bother. They imported a number of employees from Europe and hired several externally the SAME exact year they eliminated about 60% of the workforce from the site on the Southside of Chicago. -In 2017, Ferrero bought Nestle's confections division, ruthlessly criticized their company culture and norms for 8 years, and then turned around and hired a bunch of executives from Nestle. These leaders surrounded themselves with "Yes-Men" and set goals that were verifiably not attainable from the get-go, then forced them down everyones' throats. Any attempt to rationalize their targets or anchor them to facts and data was seen as affront to authority, and damaged your reputation. -The intense persona and cult-of-personality built up around leaders in the organization is antiquated and stale. -Much of the new management routinely insults staff in meetings -Company splits your "personal level assignment" from your "role title", which means in practice, you could end up doing a higher-level job for lower-level pay & benefits OR alternatively, have an inflated title relative to your actual work. -The company's PTO system is borderline nonfunctional. It does not provide accurate or up-to-date availability of hours. Rather than fixing it, HR says that they expect "employees to keep track of their own hours" but still use the system for requests. -The company, internally, is widely-known to never fire people. This is not the pro that you might think it is. A wide number of directors are known to be ineffective with people but no real effort is made to change their behavior. Great employees are often pushed to leave through more indirect means. -Double or Triple-hatting super common: many managers are asked to provide "temporary coverage" and end up doing so for years -The company tried (unsuccessfully) to withold a full week of pay from my final paycheck. I've never experienced this with any other company in my entire career.