Gradually worse and worse - Copy Centre Specialist Warehouse Stationery Employee Review

Following the merging of Warehouse Stationery with the warehouse, the amount of tasks increased tremendously (for example, scanning every barcode on each price tag in the store once a week). Pay rates and staffing didn't change at all though, despite the workload basically doubling. Head office seemed to have no idea how stores operated - one year a Christmas table was moved and restocked three times in one week as different people from head office conveyed their 'vision' for the store. Head office also advertised that staff would shop a childs stationery list and that it would be ready to collect the next day - despite our store having 4 staff some days in January (the busiest trading periods of the year). While leave entitlements are good, this overload of work combined with short staffing meant that most of the time it was impossible to take advantage of it. Store managers can be iffy as well - in my time the company put two inexperienced managers in charge where they spent most of the day sitting in their office. Even the good managers struggled to keep up with the paperwork expected of them in addition to maintaining an active presence on the floor to motivate the team. They often worked 6 day weeks and came in from 5am to do setups that simply weren't possible while trading. Targets for bonuses were frankly impossible to achieve, needing to make sales targets, addon targets AND have glowing customer reviews to even qualify- I literally got one bonus in 5 years. This meant that when one bad manager came in, the store nosedived and team morale dropped too. Similarly, if these figures were bad this was used as justification to keep the labour budget low, which made it hard to make sales as customers would walk out when no-one served them. Often staff were blamed for this, or it was pushed onto them to 'try harder' when its physically impossible to be in two places at once. This also had the flow on effect of more theft. There was no casual pool of staff to draw on, so I was often pressured to come to work sick. All these problems created a serious culture of overwork and burnout. Training was incredibly outdated even when I started (2014), citing brands that the company doesn't even sell anymore and products that no longer exist. These must be completed to get a payrise, however. Training was all conveniently moved to an app before I left, so you were often told to complete it in your own time as it was too busy, with the 'reward' being a non-backdated payrise whenever the next performance review was. Furthermore, even if you specialised in one department (stationery, technology, furniture or printing), you were expected to serve customers from other departments too, which would be fine if the training was up to par but would often lead to more time wasted doing refunds from customers sold a product that isn't suitable. I worked as a print and copy specialist, and I was also expected to do checkouts at the same time which burned me out really quickly and made customers feel uncared for - all because "the company can't justify having someone stand around at a checkout all day doing nothing". I was also threatened by a gang member with no support as a result of this decision. Due to the poor training (in my five years there I was invited to ONE copy centre training day) I spent a lot of time fixing jobs that were done incorrectly. Older co-workers especially struggled when the company foisted an entirely digital platform for communications from head office, and no tech literacy training to accompany it. The comms platform was confusing, some weren't optimized for mobile, and often made the job harder having to click through menus and screens with no unified search to find information that used to reside on the store computer.