"Soulless" reputation is well-deserved. Toxic culture. - Anonymous employee Anheuser-Busch InBev Employee Review

- Absence of moral values/soullessness. Working at ABI is kind of like selling your soul to the devil. ABI does not value people, except as a means to making money. This is a company whose behavior is regulated only by perceived self-interest. The only values leadership consistently and explicitly encourages employees to embody are ambition and competitiveness. ABI's poor treatment of people is infamous in the industry, but employees, suppliers, agencies, and distributors begrudgingly deal with ABI because of its deep pockets. To offer one example that typifies ABI's callousness when it sniffs that it can save itself a cent or a bit of trouble: one new hire relocated to another state for ABI only to be told on her second week that her new office was being closed and that she wasn't being offered another position. The company will not hesitate to pretend to be more compassionate than it really is when it thinks this might be profitable (for instance, Bud Light ever-so-briefly supporting transgender rights in an attempt to attract young liberals), but do not be fooled; ABI's ownership and management is obsessed with money and power. That's it. - Misogynistic frat culture. While interviewing with another company, an interviewer said that he had heard that Silicon Valley had nothing on ABI when it came to having a misogynistic bro culture. I haven't experienced Silicon Valley so I can't speak to that comparison, but I can confirm that it's pronounced at ABI. Senior executives talk about female employees' bodies in Portugese in the office (this has been overheard by an employee they didn't know spoke Portugese). A senior executive I had just met groped a employee of his in front of me and encouraged me to comment on her body in front of her without any apparent concern that I might find it inappropriate. Senior executives set an example of excessive drinking and public boorishness. - Cultishness. Zealous devotion to the company is expected. My onboarding included prompted chanting of the CEO Brito's name when he made an appearance, rewriting the lyrics to a well-known pop song to make it an ABI "anthem" that we had to perform, and HR employees physically blocking new employees from using the restroom (!) during long presentations by senior executives (who we should have been more "grateful" made time in their schedules for us). The new German employees in my onboarding were disturbed by how fascist the experience felt. - The Feel Good Department. Brito said in a speech to Stanford GSB that when he acquired a company, he would always kill the metaphorical "feel good department" that worked to create false optimism by sweeping problems under the rug. Unfortunately that department is alive and well at the ABI of today. People who raise issues are labeled "culturally misaligned" and passed over for promotions or shown the door. Yes-men who misleadingly filter information and depict a scrubbed version of reality to their superiors get promoted while the problems mount. - Negativity. Given the power of the Feel Good Department, most employees resort to griping behind closed doors about how unhappy they are at ABI and how they'd like to get out. People are constantly leaving. There is a steady stream of goodbye happy hours. It's a toxic and depressing environment. - Deceptive, manipulative, non-communicative HR. HR lured candidates to fill the new Corporate Strategy Office in NYC in 2015 by lying about how often bonuses have been paid out in the US (only twice since 2008, and at low payout rates). This led, as you might imagine, to a flurry of quick exits by disappointed hires. External hires I knew reported that ABI HR is the coldest, least supportive, and most manipulative HR department they've encountered in their careers. After being offered a new role, I was asked to sign a relocation benefits payback contract before the liability was calculated. I expressed my desire to have the amount I would be liable to pay back calculated prior to my signing the agreement. In response, a member of HR who I'd never met before told me over email that I could leave the company if I didn't want to accept the agreement. "Our way or the highway" is ABI's policy. ABI HR favors faits accompli: employees are informed after the fact of major decisions about their careers. - Chaos. Constantly shifting strategy. Meetings routinely starting hours late. Chronic shortage of conference rooms in a custom-built, brand new CSO. Endless fire drills about things that don't matter. Lack of process discipline. Always reinventing the wheel. Inconsistent, conclusion-driven analysis. That this exists at a company of this size is remarkable. - Incompetence. The cause of the chaos. Aside from cutting costs, ABI is surprisingly bad at conducting business. Few managers seem to know what they're doing, which is the result of 1) a propaganda-heavy, practical info-light onboarding process that does not prepare new hires for their roles 2) a bizarre HR strategy of putting people in charge of things for which they have no cultural or functional experience. The stated, faulty premise is, "a smart, "culturally-aligned" employee can do any job anywhere in our company" 3) High turnover and HR frequently moving people between positions means company experience and institutional memory is very low on most teams - Bureaucracy. An abundance of useless, box-checking processes made all the more frustrating by the chaos and incompetence cited above that good processes could ameliorate. Endless, arduous templates mandated by Global that disrupt Zone work, so Zone placates Global with junk data and moves on to real work. Sales and marketing duplicating the same time-intensive performance analyses month after month in silos. - Painfully bad technology. If you're wistful for the tech of the 90's, ABI is the place for you. Countless hours are squandered by poorly designed systems. Very frustrating. ABI tech does not enable cost center owners to prevent unauthorized charges against their centers and these charges appear in cost reports without a requisitioner identified, resulting in more hours spent playing Sherlock Holmes than I care to remember. - Nonexistent or small bonuses. ABI sets "stretch" targets that North America never hits. Don't expect to receive a bonus payout of more than 10-15% here, and usually it's 0%. In the end, I realized that most of my learning at ABI was negative: I was learning what not to do by the many mistakes happening every day at all levels of the organization. I decided to move to a competent company were I could begin engaging in positive learning. I couldn't be happier with the change.