I worked at Kohl's for over 10 years and most of those years were great, until the last 2 years before I left. Every few years, there is typically a major shake-up in executive management. For many years, those shake-ups didn't impact me that much and I had great managers. However, in 2015, my team started reporting to the executives in California instead of Wisconsin and things went downhill rapidly from there. Kohl's suddenly stopped being the Midwest success story that I had signed-up for where they cared about the people and families that made them great.
I tried to fit in with the new corporate culture that was brought-in by the CA team, but I found myself hating my job, stressed-out all the time, and feeling like no one cared about me as a person... their only concern was that I pump-out an unrealistic amount of work in an unrealistic amount of time or else I'd be put on a 30/60/90 plan to "improve my performance" or be let go. If one didn't meet the insane expectations of the new management, they were more than happy to replace you with a consultant from one of the big off-shore companies like Cognizant, Global Logic, etc. For those that didn't get replaced by consultants, you'd find that you'll spend most of your time educating and training the consultants, only have to do it all over again in a few months because of high turn-over, likely due to burn-out. It became nearly impossible to just do your job.
In addition, Human Resources required performs reviews and 360 feedback so that those who were not in management could give feedback to managers. However, all that stopped on my team, and I'm pretty sure that was against corporate policy. My manager and director stopped having performance reviews with my team and just kept piling-on the work. How was I to know if I was doing a good job or the right job? I had no idea... I just always felt like I was never doing enough.
Obviously, retail has become a highly competitive space, but I don't see that as an excuse for treating Associates like paid slaves (i.e., work 'em until they die or quit.) This goes for consultants as well; they deserve to be treated like people and not tools to be used until they wear-out.
Within the last few years, there was a strong presence of Indian consultants and staff that as Kohl's created a policy to stop using local consulting firms and only use the larger, mostly foreign firms. Quite frankly, the Indian people at my level were wonderful people... I enjoyed working with them a lot and miss them. However, it was my observation that if you were white, your career path suddenly became stunted as your Indian counterparts would get promoted past you even though they seemed way less qualified for the job in many cases (but not all). I personally didn't find this an issue as I wasn't interested in "climbing the corporate ladder", but I did observe many of my co-workers who had been at Kohl's for years and did great work get by-passed for promotions by new Indian employees. Racism is alive and well as far as I can tell, but when it happens to Caucasians, it doesn't make the news.
