Pros
There are a lot of decent people who have worked there who are driven and ambitious who achieved more after leaving the organisation. I was part of the first 100 staff where word spread around that we would get decent spare options if the company ever sold. With my own business plan ideas I thought it would be worth the risk staying with the company long term, despite having better career opportunities elsewhere due to my role at ESW. At first it looked very promising with regular townhall meetings indicating we would achieve phenomenal success. Disappointingly these regular positive meetings reduced a lot, to be mostly reduced to presentations which involved more waffle with a few times effort made to indicate the failings of a competitor as if we were perfect. You may easily experience 1 or 2 rewarding years working at ESW but you need to be prepared for things to not work out in the future as you will have to fight your corner to get more experience as there will be many cronies appointed that will take on roles that you should be doing for career advancement.
Cons
Our first ever big staff review highlighted that it was a potential issue of managers not communicating changes that have directly impacted on your job (38% of us did not give full marks) Sadly I never saw any improvement with this over the years and also experienced very poor communication between teams as well as within. To give one example which isn’t my worst, I was approached by a staff from another team with a sudden problem causing big issues for their team. I discovered the issue for them only for us to then realise that another team knew about this issue but were not bothered about it- in other words you have teams selflessly looking after their own interests (and to look good in front of senior managers) with no regard for the consequences of their mistakes. It’s very bizarre to experience the complete opposite of team work in a company that should be about constant collaboration of teams which is also down to the fact that managers think they know it all so do not want to hear from others. There’s also the culture of teams saying yes to the retailers’ requests (even if there is a better way of doing things with improved shopper experience) which such changes not being communicated to all it directly affects, resulting in negative impacts on your job. In my view if the big budget for promoting the business globally was reduced slightly to help improve outdated processes for staff, then ESW would have been better prepared to take on new retailers successfully -a bit too much of putting the horse before the cart. The number of annual leave was increased from 22 to 25 days at a time when the staff turnover rate was quite high -it wasn’t brought in from the kindness of their hearts. Due to the rapidly changing nature of ESW many people have felt shafted, even more senior managers have felt hard done by who never felt so disrespected.
