Terrible place for fresh grads (or if you want career progression)
Pros
- decent work life balance (due to recent changes in leadership, OT has become more of a norm now though) - certain floors of the office look quite nice and modern (google-esque), but other floors (eg. level 14 and 16) look terribly outdated (think traditional accounting firm) - if you're lucky, your team mates are mostly quite nice people (but capable managers are not very common)
Cons
Context: I have been with the company for nearly 2 years now and it was my first job post-graduate. I have seen and heard countless nightmares from colleagues and fellow fresh grads, especially regarding career advancement, compensation, HR, leadership. None of us feel safe posting our thoughts on Glass Door, but someone has to do it. FairPrice is NOT a place you want to go to unless you are ready for retirement / desperate. Let's deep dive: 1. Terrible progression. When i first joined, my team mate who joined FP for 3 years already after graduating was still an Executive even though she has good performance ratings, known to be a very good worker and her boss likes her, her pay was stuck at $3+k for 3 years. And even if you promote, the promotion percentage is laughable. Progression opportunities here are already scarce. Even if you do promote, you get way less than 10% (market promotion rate) of your already below market rate base pay. This means that even if you get to a senior executive level at fairprice, your pay matches a lot of similar companies' executive!!! pay. Imagine working for 2+ years and drawing a pay fresh grads are drawing in a similar company / industry. Then the cycle repeats again. Context: most executives get paid low to mid $3k, and your pay is just stuck there. My management associate programme friends (people who are handpicked to be in a leadership programme, are also drawing $3+k vs DFI MA programme, FP's biggest competitor, who are drawing $4+k). 2. Bad HR policies / team. I appreciate that the HR team tries to organise "wellness" activities / "monthly breakfasts" etc, but I would trade all of that off for decent HR policies and a HR team that truly put the people first. I will not go into detail, but myself and many others have faced countless occasions where we were either made empty promises or . Some of us were even given false hope of a higher pay when FairPrice gave us an offer and the HR team subsequently retracted the offer AFTER these people joined. Whenever people raise an issue regarding my compensation package with HR, they would make you feel like you should be happy with what you have and then wave you off. 3. Hypocritical senior leadership and HR - whenever HR does not do something well or something bad happens they shove the good ol' "Growth Mindset" motto on you, reminding you that you need to be adaptable at the workplace, which is true, but HR/senior leadership use it fairly frequent to cover themselves - basically saying that if you can't handle this, you aren't an adaptable worker. How do you think that makes workers feel? Bonus point: Laughable bonus (haha!) - A colleague of mine who was given a Green rating only got 0.2 month bonus (which is very little given how low our pay is vs market rate) ps. Office is at joo koon and they are still looking to increase our wfo days. I spend 1++h travelling to work everyday (yes this is a personal problem hence its not any of the main points above), but it's sad that we have a whole building at Raffles Place and none of the teams are even allowed to use it for a more accessible office. Sigh
