Politics and Process Gets In The Way of Doing Your Job - Merchandise Manager DFS Group Employee Review

On first impressions it's a friendly and inclusive place to work. But quickly you realise it's quite superficial, and it's hard to break into established "cliques" both professionally and socially. Senior management are very aloof, unapproachable and there are lot of big egos. If your style is a bit different from your time at other companies you've worked at, you'll either need to adjust to fit in (which becomes exhausting) or you will be shunned. You spend a lot of time in meetings that are irrelevant and hours preparing fancy presentations that don't help you get your job done. and there is a huge volume of email from different departments and regional teams to deal with. Between the meetings and email, there is very little time left to actually do your job (unless you spend very long hours) - and ultimately that affects your performance. Experience with line managers will obviously vary by individual, but entering as a middle-senior manager with many years experience, and used to quite a bit of autonomy to manage my team and projects, I found myself micro-managed and stifled by my manager. She was a nice person and well meaning, but amazingly (for a senior manager) very little idea how to manage and motivate a team. In dealings with suppliers, the company culture is to be very submissive to the demands of the big suppliers, and the relationships go all the way up to the top, so you'll find you have very little power to make an impact. It's more about just towing the line of a pre-set agenda between senior management and suppliers. It's very de-motivating to realise you can't really make an impact. And finally, if you've worked in retail and you like having that connection with stores to see the impact of what you're doing at head office in stores it's quite difficult as stores are spread across the world, and you'll only see them once or twice a year - so you feel quite detached from the operation.