H&M reviews

When I started at H&M there was a recent management change at the store, the area team management was not very supportive (understandable since there where other stores with new management teams as well) and we ended up reinventing the wheel a few times. This is a specific situation that may not apply to all cases, but I think it indicates the ease with which the perfect ideology of H&M sometimes gets lost. The ideas of support and collaboration where not upheld by our area team, which indicates that it was probably lost somewhere higher up the chain. H&M encourages staff to create their own solutions, which is liberating, but can lead to some ambiguity that makes meeting high expectations difficult. At times, it felt like we without guidance and disconnected from the rest of the company. Another issue was the challenge to create a pleasing environment for the staff. With a dissatisfied and free-floating management team, it became more difficult to support our staff. The ambiguity of our area team seeped into our management style and we were unclear about expectations and penny-pinching in our rewards. This seemed to be a general issue present in more than just our store.

Individual contribution is not readily recognized, and in most stores this creates a huge accountability issue and disengagement from job. Because over half of management staff is internally promoted many of them have no prior knowledge as to how to actually manage employees apart running a sales floor, and they're unable to bring in outside perspective or fresh ideas to enhance the company to a next level. This company's operations department is one of the most old-school and inefficient in the industry; it lacks an inventory tracking system, has just gone to a computer employee tracking system from paper-tracking system in the past year, and spends millions of dollars each year in payroll toward manual markdowns, stock checks (visual), etc. The volume and pace at which all of the stores run are too grueling for most employees, and the company has one of the highest employee turn-over rates in the industry. While things like security, employee policies, and customer information are extremeley structured, other things like corrective action, business operations and merchandising standards are relatively free-form and totally inconsistent throughout the company. Although information is exchanged freely across the entire organization, often messages and understanding are inconsistent.