Ruined by its terrible culture - Anonymous employee THG Employee Review

If you want an honest and balanced impression of what it was like to work here then I suggest you read not only the comments on this page, but also the far less glowing reviews that have been pushed downwards to page two. When I first joined it did seem there were some positive features: - responsibility - exposure to senior management - office full of young people - working for a company at the cutting edge of retail The operative word here is seem. Whilst many of the above features (bar the bottom one) are realistic, prospective candidates should be aware that these are bear traps and open to interpretation. Responsibility is given yes, but it comes at the cost of having absolutely no support, advice, or teaching from anyone with more than an ounce of retail or business acumen. So responsibility isn't actually about challenging talented people. More often than not young employees are saddled with entire websites to run and improve but aren't guided on how this might be done, or even given a clear impression of what kind of mess they're being given to sort out. I have never heard of one person being given anything that could be thought of as training. The problem with this is that the same mistakes are continually repeated. People don't feel that they are learning core business or retail principles but rather are just sorting out daily issues from one day to the next (discount codes not working, lists not being in the right order, pricing hasn't come through to site - you get the gist). This resulted in a building full of talented people, with yes lots of "responsibility" who were actually very bored and frustrated. You are exposed to senior management, this is true. But this is not, as mentioned above, about learning from the best and most experienced people in the building. Exposure really means that you're wide open to a daily, and public, barrage of emails from the top. If your site isn't performing on any given hour, yes hour, you can expect someone from the directors' room to ask you why and what you're going to do about it that hour. And this of course occurs in front of the entire business. If you're power hungry and sycophantic enough, which many people are, you can suck-up your way closer to the directors. But this doesn't lead to more (any) mentoring. It'll just help you rise up the ladder, if that's what you want (you shouldn't). The office is (or used to be) full of young people, fresh faces straight out of university. This is, in theory, a great thing. Young people have energy, they’re curious, they’re unshackled by the bad habits they’ve acquired during their 20 years in a large corporate. Whilst these points may be true to an extent there are also some big issues that come from an office packed with inexperience. First, those who have been promoted to senior roles have very little experience in their respective fields. They therefore make poor teachers. They are also inexperienced managers and, as no one receives any training, they are never actually taught themselves how to be better. Many are also unwilling to teach those below them. They are protective over their own, recently acquired, positions and therefore reluctant to help someone only a few years younger than them to rise up and possibly over them. Secondly, there is an uncontrolled and toxic “lad culture” that permeates the entire office. In fact, it trickles down from the top. If there were a little more maturity in the building, and some senior women somewhere in the organisation, then perhaps that would help to curb the huge amount of casual sexism that occurs. It seems that you've got a job in a business that is truly at the cutting edge of ecommerce and technology. "It's going to be so big", "we'll be bigger than Amazon". Well unfortunately that is just a lot of hyperbole. There's nothing particularly innovative going on. Yes the business can be very reactive, and yes the entire workforce can respond to an hourly dip in sales by slashing prices and pumping out some new discount codes and emails. But is this innovative? It didn't seem so to me. There are very few organic sites. So the opportunity to really build something is lacking. Many people's jobs are just about feeding the machine and hitting the numbers. There is little to no strategic planning. The Hut's ability to be reactive and agile is packaged as its strengths, but the flip side to this is that very few people even look so much as a month ahead. The potential therefore to do innovative things doesn’t exist.