Despite large initiatives (like Chalhoub Impact and the Corporate Games) creating a sense of teamwork I found the company dysfunctional and followed a top-down leadership, within which, despite attending meetings during my time there of how business functions could be improved, the workers doing the jobs were not listened to and management bulldozed ahead in their own set way of doing things.
My role was not as I was led to expect during the application process and I had no sense of autonomy. I was overloaded. Often being asked to do unnecessary activities like preparing last-minute presentations for internal management meetings rather than focussing on my actual job. Everything was always thrown at you last minute, even in projects/activities that I was given time to prepare for there always seemed to be a change of direction at the last minute or/otherwise the manager senior to my own would not agree which the direction my manager had advised and I had to rework everything. This inefficient way of working often cut into my personal time. I had to work early mornings, late evenings and weekends to get the job done. This culture of working beyond your contracted hours was rife throughout the company.
I always felt I was just going from one urgent task to the next. Always putting out a flame rather then working efficiently and strategically.
Whilst I was employed there was a company restructuring. Whole teams were reconfigured with no discussions with the employees working on them. For example, people who had worked on the same brands for years (and loved their jobs because of the brands) were moved to completely different brands and therefore teams. I knew a few people deeply unhappy about the changes and I suggested they should just talk to management to try to discuss the decision and try to get back onto their previous brands. My colleagues said flatly that this was not something they could discuss with their managers and it would be detrimental to them to even approach the subject.
There were also a lot of unnecessary repetitions in work due to the company structure across different countries. For example, there were analysts and marketing professions at the head office and also local analysts and marketing professionals. The head office staff were intended to lead the local markets but what actually happened was just a lot of duplication of work due to unclear job roles and responsibilities.
Whilst I was there, there were huge issues with the data I was using. It was an unclear period between using the new BI analytics recently introduced, where a lot of the base data hadn’t been unloaded properly so could provide incorrect results, and getting local analysts to provide required data using excel, in which case the data provided was often incorrect due to human-error and local analysts possibly not being trained as well as they should be. I found there was a very slap-dash approach in getting things done i.e. do the job to a surface level to suffice and not worry if the data being used was correct and reliable. For a conscientious worker I found this a very uncomfortable way to work, but when I raised the issue to anyone it only seemed to make the matter worse. I felt I had no-one to turn to for help or who understood the problem.
I did not find the working environment an enjoyable one. There was a lot of gossiping behind people’s backs, individuals out for themselves and a blame culture. Knowledge was not shared; I actually felt some colleagues deliberately withheld information to make themselves more ‘indispensable’ or possibly because they didn’t actually understand the processes they were following themselves. There was a sense of ‘there... that’s your problem now’.
