Marks & Spencer reviews

An absolutely shocking place to work I wouldn’t recommend ANYONE to work here. They expect you to do all the overtime in the world yet you get no thanks or appreciation for doing so. The Christmas hours are ridiculous, they pride themselves in letting their staff have Christmas Day and Boxing Day off yet they fail to inform the public that they make their staff work the days back. I worked in the cafe and I have never felt so run down and exhausted in all my life. We were constantly short staffed because new starters would never stay on long enough due to the poor working conditions. Which then also meant that myself and my colleagues would have to do the work of about 5 people at once - and then we’d further get told off for forgetting or missing to do things. I could list many more cons about this company but the final one that has really ticked me off is that I’m now being forced to pay them £500 because I’ve left the company. Even though I worked my notice. I asked them to explain to me what I owe them £500 for and they still have failed to show or explain to me what it is for. I will never work for this company ever again.

Frequently M&S treats its employees as one-size fits all. There seems to be little consideration of individual motivation or differing personalities, although they pay lip-service once you reach management level. Unfortunately, it seems that increasingly, the type of person the business wants to employ as their Store Managers is the bullying type. The business has also adopted a policy of 'Managing Your Bottom 5%' which essentially means 5% of every team needs to be performance managed (frequently in the negative sense rather than the stretching management of the highest performers), this has created a very negative and unpleasant atmosphere in stores. Internal promotion from Section Manager level is practically non-existent and movement into Head Office from Stores literally never occurs unless you are a D Band Store Manager.