- There is a restructure every 6 months resulting in staff being laid off over and over again - my advice is: save yourself the trouble of having to look for another job 6 months down the line and skip this company, the business has no hard feelings hiring someone and making them redundant 1/2 months after
- Not a single penny received to cover the inflation rate, pay stayed the same year on year whilst a wage increase to cover the inflation rate is one of the minimum requirement, if you cannot afford this, then you should not be in business, it is difficult time for everyone and other businesses have done everything they could to cover the inflation rate despite their own business challenges. This will also show your employees some consideration and will make them feel treated like an actual human being.
- Lack of clear vision and overall strategy, in other words this business does not know what it is doing or where it is going. The strategy changes every 6 months along with the restructures, surely you need more time to implement a strategy and for it to work, allowing a short amount of time before changing strategy again, will only make the matter worse and will not improve the situation you are currently in
- The business is very quick to cut budgets and lay off people when numbers are bad even if only for a short amount time, surely there are other steps you can take before it comes to that: Have you tried expanding the distribution? Are you doing everything you can / using the right tools / third parties to improve conversion rate ? Have you restricted business travel to only essential purpose ? Have you tried hosting townhalls online instead of making everyone rush to one location on the next day due to short notice ? Have you talked to the experts you hired to assess how the situation can be improved? Have you considered entering other markets to make up the shortfall for your saturated markets?
- Multiple budget cuts throughout the year, however targets are not adjusted to reflect this and stay the same which will set everyone up for failure from the get go. Be more realistic with your targets and look at year on year performance before coming up with a number that is way too high to achieve, it's very admirable to be ambitious but it has to stay within reason and still relate to your yearly growth (the actual one not the one you would like to see).
- The business will invest millions of pounds to projects and go to market strategies, only to pull back of it all months after. This is a huge waste of budget, resources and time. You are either willing to go full in or you don't, it's simple as that. If you go full in, be patient, it will take time to reap all the rewards. If you decide not to go ahead, this is fine and at least you have not spent an enormous budget on a project you stopped halfway through it but make a clear cut and do not deviate from it.
- There has never been any communication to indicate who had been made redundant to the staff that was staying nor any proposed structure, many employees found themselves without a line manager and when they have finally been appointed one, that new line manager had nothing to do (or no knowledge) with its team area of expertise, therefore these employees had no one to turn to for advice on their own field. Redundancies have left a huge gap and many skills have been lost, which essentially damaged performance even further as some improvements / optimisations have been impossible to implement. Many employees found themselves having to do three people jobs with no financial compensation. It is also nice to give your staff members some new fancy titles that look like a promotion but trust me, financial compensation is even better. No one takes on extra responsibilities for charity. Do you really think you will retain your staff like this?
- The business is completely disorganised, from your first day to getting along with your tasks, there is absolutely zero onboarding process. And as you go along, you will see that none of the processes implemented work, it is a constant battle to get anything done. There are too many stakeholders that should not be involved in certain areas to start with, slowing down everything you are trying to do. Once again, leave the experts you hired do their job and only get involved when it is a critical matter, your staff knows what's best and let them use their entrepreneurial spirit, they will come to you if there is any issue or doubts.
- This business does not understand how marketing works at all and despite, what they may say, marketing is not a priority or a central part of the business. It is heavily sales focused and all the people appointed in the leadership team reflect this, which means no one understand the power of having a proper multi-channel marketing strategy (from D2C to retail and distribution). Therefore, there is a short term approach at the moment, which will not serve any of the brands in the long term run. Marketing can help chase after every single sale out there but it is much more than that: from building brand awareness, to drive consideration to then retarget your potential consumers, the options of what you can do are limitless but only work if used in conjonction. Investing in only one area of marketing will limit your demand and will impact your potential as a business negatively: If you don't drive brand awareness, you will not generate consideration or interest in any of your brands and therefore you will not generate demand and your sales will decrease. There are only a certain amount of people you can retarget when you don't invest in creating demand no matter how much budget you throw at retargeting.
I hope this review will help whoever is considering taking a job with Glen Dimplex and hope it will give you a clear view of what is going on and what to expect. I am not one to complain and this is in fact my first review ever on Glassdoor. I have worked in many industries over the past decade and I have never seen anything like this before. Just like you, I had read the reviews on here to consider whether or not I should join this business and thought: "surely it cannot be that bad". Well it is... It is actually worse than I thought it would be and I do not want someone else to be in this situation ever again so here I am doing my due diligence and warning you about Glen Dimplex. As sad as it is, the business is completely against change (even though it claims not to be) and it will continue to do the same thing over and over again, not learning from past mistakes. Anything that is implemented and supposed to benefit the business positively does not improve the situation, if anything, it makes it all worse. And in case you are thinking that maybe things are different now, they are not, it has been this way for many years now and no steps have been taken to improve the situation. All the values that Glen Dimplex claims to stand for are just for show, none of them are actually taken into consideration or implemented. Your talent will be wasted in a company like this as they are nowhere near in line with nowadays basic business practices and digital era. It is an old business that has failed to compete with other cutting edge businesses and your career options or learning abilities will be limited within the organisation.
