Crate and Barrel reviews

Absolutely no work-life balance, schedule is never the same week-to-week and it could be, communication from leaders is sporadic, inconsistent, contradictory of each other, or doesn't happen at all. Arbitrary business process changes are frequent, not discussed with the end users, and invariably are found to not work. The time and resources lost in these useless endeavors is exhausting and creates an atmosphere of distrust and lack of respect for store and corporate leaders. Any criticism is met with a demand to be positive and/or being told you are negative. This is power abuse at its worst. The constant gas-lighting and expectation to be perfect in your mood and attitude in order to move up is not realistic and inhumane.

I had high hopes for Crate, but this experience has really fallen short of my expectations. Every department at corporate is short staffed and has not enough resources to do their job, so one person does the work of a few people. Very lean organization, which leads to burnout across departments. You can ask for more resources, but requests will be ignored. Since everyone is so busy, you will not get much guidance from managers and you will have to make a ton of decisions on your own. Expect cancelled meetings and managers and directors declining meetings since they won't make time for you. There is a lack of clear job boundaries on who owns what across the organization, so there are no clear owners on reporting and projects and work is passed around to other departments -- also due to the insane volume of workloads. It's not a friendly, warm culture especially since it's located in Northbrook. First, there is a lack of documentation on processes which makes it difficult. Second, people do not want to share information or communicate - especially the higher ups. The strategy has been unclear for years and is not communicated at all employee meetings, which is odd, although with the new CEO it is getting better. Sharing information up and down is an area of opportunity so people understand that they are working towards common goals. Also, there is a lot of passive aggressive behavior going on. Upper management does not respect employee's expertise and questions them a lot. Performance review goals should be clear and employees should be held to those standards instead of giving employees feedback at reviews that they should have been working on something else all along when this is the first time you heard it. Lastly, it is not a customer-centric culture. What customers say matters little when it comes to prioritizing and fixing issues. Systemic problems are unable to be solved because higher ups come up with excuses, ask for more data, or try blaming other departments rather than taking the time and collaborating with others to solve issues. This makes it difficult to get anything done. There is a weird, stubborn status quo that has been accepted for many years.