Unilever reviews

1) With all the hype of strong values for things like work life balance, working moms, equality in work place. In practice and implementation the company falls behind. Although you are given option for working remotely, you still work crazy hours. Managers don't really understand working mom challenges. 2) The politics is very bad especially in the Finance Division. There are clear favorites, who are tactically given opportunities to exceed while others are set behind. You will work yourself like crazy but you know who is going to be promoted. The group in charge of promotions and moving around people are very biased. 3) Managers are not trained to be leaders. They dont know how to inspire people. Its always about meeting the deadlines and pleasing the management even if comes at the cost of disrespecting you and overworking you. The managers dont look out for their people, they manage their own career because they know if they do well they will land a better roll in 2-3 years and will have new people to work with, so there is no vested interested to invest in their reports. 4) Lack of interaction with leadership. Your relationship is stuck with your manager, lack of communication with Directors or VPs. 5) Very low chances of getting promoted. If you are going to move up in the company, it will take you 5-6 years to become a manager and another 10 years to become a Director, even if you are experienced hire.

Unilever was a dream company when I joined, and they walked the walk early on. However, since the Kraft Heinz bid, the things that made Unilever great to work for slowly eroded away. Over the last couple of years, that erosion accelerated. In supply chain, leadership's objective is clear: outsource and automate away as many jobs as possible to save cost on the bottom line. However, employees are left to speculate when their job is next, as leadership gives no information until they announce that a function is getting outsourced to third party providers (customer service/order management, master data management, parts of logistics/transportation). This leads to constant anxiety and frustration, as employees are afraid to make any mistake because it will just be fodder for the "transformation" and "integrated operations" teams to work faster to find the next external solution at the expense of your job. The people are generally fun to work with, and direct middle management (in my experiences) are great at recognizing the humanity of the operation and doing everything they can to keep people happy, as they see the frustration from lower level employees and truly want to help. However their hands are tied, because this disappears at director level and above. There is the top-down expectation of robot-like efficiency, which is very difficult to achieve since Unilever has started the practice of not hiring backfills for many open roles, and it feels like half of the year every year is a hiring freeze. The idea of a trade off does not exist, and everything is demanded at the same time, even when decisions that benefit one metric come at the direct expense of another. Constant finger pointing between functions leads to stalled decision making processes as everybody is forced to look out for themselves, and the company finds itself having the same issues every quarter. To get promoted and be successful in supply chain, you'll either need to play the corporate political game very well, or put in unsustainable and mentally draining levels of hours a week. It is scary to see people online and sending emails at 9pm and Saturday/Sunday. If you are unwilling to do either of those, you'll likely get stuck at the Associate Manager level, where competitors can easily outbid Unilever on salary since pay rates aren't great compared to similar companies in the area.