Pros
Christmas dinner once a year, no other team lunches or meetups provided at all. No morning teas or birthdays or womens day celebrations at all.
Cons
Staff uniforms are ordered once a year. The one full time manager in the store gets around 8 pieces, and the 99% of other staff, part-time and casual get just one set of itchy woolen sweaters and trousers. Expect to get team uniform that is not in your size or even your gender. Expect to wait upwards of 21 weeks for your order from slow melbourne distribution heads. Staff are expected to return used uniform on end of employment which gets sent back to head office and then destroyed I guess. Great use of company time and logistics resources just to 'snatch back' old worn product. There is a clear distinct in the quality between staff uniform and non staff product so why this return is so emphasised above hmm maybe an exit interview or an employment retention discussion is beyond me. The company gift for christmas was a botique jam, nut and biscuit set. Unsure of how our team of 10 people were supposed to share artisian biscuits and jams on the floor of a David Jones when we arent allocated special time to celebrate acheivements or enjoy meals with eachother, have staff birthdays or even melbourne cup day, ect, especially since David Jones staff share a fridge with over 150+ other staff that is a 5 minute travel away from our indivdual concession. Disgraceful behaviour from store managers towards staff. Expect to be treated like a child. It seems the direction given from top-down is to ridicule, resent and reiterate your discontent with current happenings in the workplace. No store or company culture at all. No recognition for acheviements big or small, and youre only as good as your last sale. There is no ammicable way to leave this company, ive seen several staff including managers been told to leave work or had shift cancelled in their final days out of fear they won't 'try hard enough' or fear they will act belligerent on their final hours on the clock. Most companies will have a lunch or get together if someone moves on, this group will cancel your shift and tell you don't let the door... Your job posting will be on seek within hours of your resignation being submitted, at which stage mangers will discuss huge plans for remittance and reconfiguration on issues you have been trying to address for months. I've witnessed multiple euorpean employees who have experience in designer sales in their home nations comment on the complete disorganisation encompassed by the Australian business, including things as small as stock managment to larger issues like employee support + development, staff retention, staff accomdations, expectations and coworker behaviour. Unbeleivable gossip culture by store managers - this seems to be encouraged by area leaders and even HR. There are no sound metrics for satisfactory performance, you're either in the managers good books, or you arent smart enough to only ask for shifts on weekends when lightning can strike twice and you can hit their ridiculous productivty metrics. I was expected to make $500 productivity an hour when my shifts were 4-7pm on a tuesday and wednesday night, the slowest trade days of the week especially for a slow department store. If youre good at pointing the finger this is the job for you. If you want to put your head down and work hard and expect your merit to be enough to get you through the trading weeks, i suggest you look elsewhere.
