Marks & Spencer reviews

1. Management very good at delegating their failures downwards 2. Poorly trained and not very educated management teams 3. Senior staff bully and cajole junior staff into constantly improving productivity with fewer resources 4. No flexibility of working days / hours when family events dictate a need for a short term change 5. Barely any staff on shop floor so when customers do find you they are pressured and fed up 6. Reducing food to customers at a set time of day irritates regular customers as it attracts a certain type of client which the regulars don't feel comfortable with 7. Few staff available to give customers proper M&S levels of service 8. Too many family and friends are employed. Many many managers children work in our store despite their unsuitability. They will be the ones who are rude to customers, talk too much too loudly to each other and are not reprimanded for it 9. Above point leads to demonstrable favouritism amongst managers and section coordinators towards these people 10. Only permitted to have one person on annual leave at a time and holiday has to be booked ... wait for it ... almost two years in advance! 11. Staff not permitted to swap working days if not in the working week (Sunday to Saturday) 12. Try to break employment law by saying that you're not permitted to have time off to deal with family emergency and that this will be counted against personal sickness absence 13. Do not recognise union membership readily and are very reluctant to deal with them 14. Force changes on staff with a 'like it or lump it!' attitude constantly loosing experienced staff and knowledge 15. Diluting brand with cheaper ingredients and materials

- Progression path was not always clear/possible - Design team was usually spread far too thin in terms of workload; there could be a lack of ownership due to poor or mismatched design direction between teams which created more work/changes - One can feel like 'just a number' due to the company size and distance from the top brass, whom often made decisions that didn't always make sense (they downsized at unusual times, for example, which affected morale). - Expected to work a lot of days in-store which was a struggle in/around the workload (and while trying to find time to take annual leave) - There was a little too much corporate red-tape regarding HR, annual performance reviews, etc. Employees surveys felt like tick-the-box exercises for example, because negative feedback was typically disregarded