A negative review of a once great place to work destroyed by management - Technical Operator AG Barr Employee Review

After 15 years of hard labour in the Cumbernauld manufacturing site I can provide an honest assessment of the factory but not the office as I haven’t worked there. If you are looking for a positive glowing report then look away now as this is an honest summary of a terrible working environment where they deliberately attempt to dehumanise staff through servitude. An ex-prison officer runs the show, through the people skills learned within the prison service, employees are more like inmates than workers serving hard labour. Barrs state that they are a diverse and inclusive employer where your voice can be heard but unfortunately this is complete nonsense and the stories told by Pinocchio are far more believable, almost all leaderships are related in some way and have been promoted from the shop floor on the basis of the old pals’ act, with no external industry experience, no engineering or manufacturing qualifications and no recognised FMCG industry qualifications. The diversity in the Cumbernauld manufacturing site is entirely questionable with 99.9% of employees being white, and related to someone else in here so no diversification within the Cumbernauld manufacturing environment. An alarming concern in 2021 given the product demographics of Funkin or Rubicon, top sellers in the Barr portfolio. Sadly, the machinery purchased to run the site is now mainly cheap Italian and not the precision Krones machinery you would expect for a company turning over 250 million pounds a year. It’s a constant battle to run the site with Leadership unqualified and clueless how to fix machinery or get a quality product out the door to consumers. Human Resources has had the same head for nearly 20 years so this would explain the stagnation of the company’s direction and the core HR values are as if it was still the 1980’s. The site can’t run without people doing overtime, unfortunately that’s the company’s business model which has led to a false sense of income where staff do so much overtime that they build their lifestyle around double their salary so their afraid to speak out about the aggressive leadership style and it’s my way or the high way style of manner because they may lose their overtime and won’t be able to pay for their Range Rover Sport. Sadly, a huge number of talented staff have fled in the past 5 years to other FMCG companies not just because of the dehumanisation of staff by management and the failure by HR to acknowledge these issues, but because the business is stuck in the past and the salary and benefits are far less than competitors. Working now for another FMCG manufacturer shows me how right I am, about how badly Barrs Cumbernauld site is run. It's a culture of threatening people because of leadership failings and incompetence and are clueless in planning and understanding simple machinery errors and how to run the lines effectively.