TOXIC SINKING SHIP - AVOID - Purchasing Coordinator Lidl Employee Review

Training/Onboarding: You are given a 2 week ‘onboarding’ in which you are booked in back to back meetings that your team has been required to fill. Most of the time they do not even know what to cover and have no concrete plan. Majority time is spent shadowing and being thrown into tasks almost immediately. Training opportunities are almost non existent. Most trainings are linkedin learning classes and the schedule is always posted mid-year (late). You will be required to do a ‘feet on the ground’ day in the store working as a store employee once a year. You will waste your time learning almost nothing relevant or transferable here. Workload/Workflow: Lidl is run entirely on excel (let that sink in). There are no real project workload dashboards/processes, and if the excel sheet ‘system’ is down, everyone’s work stream is affected. These sheets are editable by almost anyone and have errors in them all the time. The company refuses to invest in real project management tools despite everyone begging them to do so. Workload is also very dynamic and can be incredibly overwhelming one week and non-existent the next. Often times projects will be reliant on Lidl International responses and miscommunication is very common. There is very little consistency. Townhalls/Events: Townhalls are held monthly during lunchtime. They go over KPIs (many of the numbers are often fabricated to make the company look better, this has been confirmed by executives in other meetings not held in front of the entire company). Karen the head of HR plays ‘walk up songs’ which include ‘Shots’ and ‘All I Do is Win’ (both played in their entirety and explicitly). For the annual xmas party (now held at the office rather than offsite like in years past) all departments are asked (heavily encouraged) to decorate. People take this incredibly seriously and will work late. This year HR decorated in the theme of Mean Girls the movie and hung up a banner with condoms taped to it saying ‘Santa only comes (you know how it's spelled) once a year’ and then they won whatever spirit competition for it. The company gift for working hard all year was a cheap sweatshirt drop shipped from China. There was a raffle of about 8 ridiculously expensive prizes that only a handful of people got. No bonuses were given (there are never bonuses). Leadership: CEO Joel Rampoldt and his new executive team are heartless people who do not care about their employees. They cannot decide on a strategy and change course almost weekly. They do not see employees as people, only as numbers. Karen is just as bad and head of HR, so good luck reporting or complaining about anything. On the management/department specific level, the micromanaging is crazy. Managers consistently make decisions and then weeks later change their minds, causing time and money wasted. You can start as early as 7am but if you leave before 4 it’s very frowned upon (often times managers will tell you that you aren’t allowed to leave at/before 4 despite getting your hours in). RTO: Everyone was given 3 weeks notice to return to office 3 days a week. Department directors and managers were not told of this decision ahead of time or given any opportunity to discuss with leadership. They had to beg to inform their teams before the downhill that day. This was a clear tactic to get people to quit without paying out severance. Any questions/exceptions were to be sent in to HR and were ignored. Then the Friday before RTO went into effect, all cases were denied. Those who did not show up in the following weeks were then fired without severance. If you cannot come in on an in office day you have to take PTO, no exceptions. You cannot even take one week during the year (like during the holidays) to be remote. Benefits: Everyone has 2 sick days. Health insurance coverage got worse and costs more. They no longer provide parking (all transponders were taken away) and will not cover any costs. Commuting subsidy is also quite low and not enough to cover 3 days a week. Oh but they now provide a subscription to the calm app. Layoffs: There have been 2 official layoffs in the last year, as well as many ‘quiet layoffs’ (RTO mandate, cleaning out random departments). The company is not transparent at all about the company’s standing. The month before the layoffs this year they shared that the company was profitable, then laid off an undisclosed number of people (of course) a few weeks later. Everyone laid off was told that it was not performance based but those let go all were given 2s on performance reviews that month for various BS reasons. Managers/leadership had been planning the layoff for quite some time and knew who would be let go, but let them move for RTO anyway. Almost the entire IT department was laid off when constant issues with the International systems and excel come up (good luck fixing anything in a timely manner). Overall: This company will not last in the US much longer. They do not care about you, they will work you to the bone until they find a cheaper way to do things and will get rid of you. Moving up is impossible and promotions are often dangled in front of you with no plan to ever actually give it to you. Very volatile and toxic work environment. DO NOT WORK OR SHOP HERE.