Weak organizational structure: Managers/supervisors across departments are not on the same page when it comes to meeting company goals and various departments will establish SOPs in ways that do not mesh well with others, leading to bottlenecks in the workflow. The hierarchy of management is saturated to a select few running multiple departments and adverse situations will easily get over their heads. The information systems used here are also outdated and have barriers to vital data that certain departments need; this results in heavy reliance on asking for info from other departments such as customer service asking for an ETA to purchasing, some of these follow ups can take days to respond.
Blatant favoritism: Personal favorites by many higher ups tend to get away with a slap to the wrist even with egregious decisions while others making minor mistakes would be put on the limelight (i.e. one employee who habitually calls in sick will get the okay even on an abrupt notice while another will be demanded a doctor’s note to authorize use of sick leave); same manager who continuously swept a former supervisor’s appalling behavior towards customers under the rug up until a YouTube content creator exposed it online.
Questionable KPIs: Most of the evaluations of work here are based on raw numbers and meeting quota. Managers and supervisors don’t factor the complexities of certain assignments such as building products with delicate and expensive parts, which leads to departments such as production going for the easier tasks first at the of tedious ones not being handled in a punctual manner. Workers not being met with those quotas despite given complicated assignments would still be subject to disciplinary action.
Poor handling of COVID: The company initially had the right idea of implementing work from home protocols during the height of the pandemic but kept efforts adjacent to the bare minimum. The work from home procedures were temporary until early 2021 and even the setups were still questionable to following CDC guidelines (i.e. work from home was only rotational for employees with call center and data entry tasks with no proper social distancing, and no preventative measures to stop or mitigate the spread of it during winter season until it was significant enough to potentially shut the building down)
Unethical business practices: Sweatshop labor tactics are a common practice here; the web department is complicit with greenlighting management’s negligent practices that severely affect other departments (i.e. ignoring alarming requests from accounting to fix their website that was systematically duplicating credit card transactions during the holiday rush, creating an excruciating amount of work for customer service and accounting while flooding bad PR for marketing and social media teams) During the 2020 holiday season, they’ve also falsely advertised guaranteed deliveries of all Black Friday / Cyber Monday orders before Christmas on their website without any input from other departments if it was feasible; most of those orders did not fulfill that promise, and led to production rushing their work to mitigate damages that were already done; shipping working with severe bottlenecks while expected to meet unrealistic quotas; customer service, sales, marketing, and tech support getting constantly bombarded with angry customers; RMA and tech support ill-equipped to keep pace with the staggering amount of parts and repairs needed to go out; and accounting having to process a bottomless amount of paperwork to clean up web’s mess. OSHA violations also happen on occasion: An employee who had a wrist injury with a cast still had to drive to work and perform ergonomic tasks such as typing; the water systems had a roach problem that wasn’t addressed until a couple of weeks later while the water was still running despite alarming concerns to HR. It’s clear the modus operandi of this company is to sell as much products as it can, consumer feedback or employee morale be damned; only reason this company is able to stay afloat in its current state is because of the global chip shortage.
Dysfunctional management: Management expects workers to go above and beyond for pay well below industry standard and have the audacity to complain about their employees being unproductive while failing to provide reasonable solutions to address those issues. They are notorious for creating a hostile work environment such as throwing personal tantrums (i.e. kicking an employee’s chair and yelling at that person around other employees over mistakes that could be corrected with civility); another instance is threatening to cut employees' bonus over “whining” that were simply concerns on follow ups for information unavailable to their reps to help around the company; there were also allegations of racism that played into the rampant favoritism, rather than trying to make amends with employees, management aggressively dismissed the allegations, swept it under the rug, and the culprit played victim over them. Fundamentally, management just lacks the emotional intelligence to deal with disgruntled / uncomfortable employees and it strongly reflects on their turnover rate of a revolving door even before COVID.
