H&M reviews

The Barcelona office is run like a typical Spanish company (be grateful for your job, no matter how badly we treat you), despite the nice core company values they have on paper. Serious incompetence, nepotism and cronyism and general bad treatment of the agents and team leaders from top management. HR department is basically a 'company shill department' instead of an impartial one, which should be a trust-able place to discuss grievances etc. I think this is the core of the problem. You are officially encouraged to give positive and negative feedback, but don't give the negative unless you want it to be held against you. Recently, it is better however as the Swedish HQ provided a type of direct 'hotline' to to report anything very bad. But without a full review of how the place is run the core problem is not solved. The Swedish HQ I think believes their core company values that they are proud to talk about, but they seem to not care that Barcelona office doesn't come close to living by them. On top of the poor 'human' management, the systems and tools they have are a joke and fail often. Some day they might realise the cheapest tools are the worst and cost more in the long term (lesson 1 of project management).

Values are used at convince of the managers. Since the first day making mistake is said to be a possibility only if it happens you feel judged and the mistake is not analysed in order to learn from it. Values are different from manager to manager and country to country, no consistency. I felt many time that management was hypocritical as was asking me to treat my team in a certain way, referring alwyas to the value and then I was not treated the same way. Feedback is used in a very dangerous way, pushing sometimes employees to express all their frustration in the annual great place to work survey.