poor policy decisions, stressful work environment, disconnected from hourly workers - Retail Store Staff Mud Bay Employee Review

Cons: Overall, Mud bay is not a good company to work for. I would not recommend working here. TLDR: 1. MudBay has high turnover, skeleton crews, and high burnout levels. 2. Unrealistic availability requirements 3. Abusive attendance policy and inadequate, slowly accruing PTO 4. Disorganized and Disconnected Upper Management and Home Office Mud Bay consistently makes policies and decisions that negatively impact hourly workers. The lower you are in the company, the worse off you are. Work life balance is difficult to maintain, and building a stable career seems impossible. Even tenured hourly employees are struggling. Upper management has not taken any meaningful steps towards improving hourly employees’ working conditions. This tells me that they do not value hourly employee’s opinions or struggles. Here are just a few examples of problems at Mud Bay. 1. Turnover, hours cuts, layoffs: Recently, due to the company’s financial problems, MudBay chose to implement a huge wave of layoffs and hour cuts at the store level. My coworkers and I, along with my manager, reached out to upper management to see if any similar “difficult decisions” such as budget cuts, layoffs, or restructuring were taking place at the home office. I never received a clear answer, only vague mentions of possible job cuts. As a result of these decisions, stores are consistently short-staffed. They are running on skeleton crews and turnover is lightning fast. The burnout I’m seeing is the highest I’ve ever seen while working here. 3. Abusive attendance policy and PTO: The attendance policy and PTO accrual alone is enough for me to strongly discourage people from working here. It creates a domino effect that negatively impacts the whole team. Employees receive “points” for missing work if they don’t have the PTO to cover it. Points can lead to disqualifying you for promotions and termination. What’s worse is that Mud Bay does not accept doctor’s notes. Get covid or have to go to the emergency room? Does not matter. Unless you qualify for FMLA or similar, you are in trouble. If you have a chronic illness or disability and are not confident you can access FMLA or aren’t sure if you have an adequate safety net for an inequitable attendance policy, please reconsider applying. I can’t tell you how much it hurt to see myself and my coworkers in pain, unwell, and/or facing job and career progression penalties as a result of this policy. PTO (sick and vacation are combined) accrues extremely slowly and you start from 0. If you get sick at all during the first few months of employment and have to miss work you will start getting “points”. If you get sick, you will not have PTO to go on vacation. As a result of this policy, employees frequently show up to work sick or not fully recovered because they’re afraid of losing their job. Which results in more people getting sick and the cycle continues. When I brought up this combined problem of punitive attendance policy and extremely slow PTO accrual, one of upper management’s suggestions was to just get promoted so my PTO would accrue more quickly. Again, points impact your ability to be promoted…I tried to have a meaningful and productive conversation about how these policies were negatively impacting their employees, but upper management seemed disappointingly unreceptive. 4. Disorganized and disconnected upper management and home office I got the sense that the home office and upper management are struggling to create consistency. I saw this in whiplash employment decisions, policy creation that clearly had no input from hourly employees, implementing sales campaigns but not being able to answer questions from hourly employees, etc.