IT cannot be a happy day when the organisation that you work for makes the top ten of this infamous list: ‘Worst Companies to Work For In 2013″. Nevertheless, although the dubious winners on this line-up are all from North America, we in Jamaica should perhaps be brave and enterprising enough to come up with one of our own.
Can you imagine for a second, if we did a similar list here. Just suppose the findings of the research appeared to be spot on and your employee ID told you that were a long-serving employee (not the owner or a son or daughter) of said company, it might just cause you to do some serious introspection. I don’t know about you, but I would perhaps feel very badly for myself and my fellow employees. My main takeaway from this article was the feedback from employees who they felt that their unhappiness stemmed from the serious issues they had with middle management. There were some people who felt that “they were unfairly treated, or treated like children or pressured with extreme demands”.The listing was done by 24/7 Wall Street and the method they used was to examine employee reviews at jobs and career community site Glassdoor. The website hosts employee reviews and uses those opinions to score companies on a scale of one to five, with five representing the best place to work and one the worst. 24/7 Wall Street identified the nine publicly traded companies that received scores of 2.5 or lower.I will start with the ‘winner’: DISH, which has come in for this dubious distinction the second year in a row. I cannot imagine that the management or directors are at this point clinking champagne glasses as we speak. The workers of this company say they despise the organiSation for which they work. “DISH’s management is regarded as so inconsiderate to employees, customers and shareholders that Businessweek recently called it “The Meanest Company In America”. In reviews at Glassdoor, employees regularly complained about very poor pay despite their difficult work in unpleasant conditions.Tthe most common criticisms were the low salaries, relative to the type of work and very poor benefits. “One manager on Glassdoor said that he had never seen employees treated so poorly. The benefits are pitiful and the salaries are not current with industry — I should know as I work in a (department) that see the salaries.” Ouch! That stings. Although times are economically challenging for most companies, this is one that perhaps needs to embark on a tour of self-examination. Two times is certainly not a charm.Second place went to Express Scripts Holding Company, one of America’s largest managers of prescription drug services, while the third in the line up of ‘beauty contestants’ was Dillards Department Store which is controlled by the Dillard family. They have built about 300 stores in 29 states and operate in a very competitive environment. Some of the bellyaching of the employees include: sales-per-hour targets which workers say are unreasonable and which lead to intense employee rivalry. “Lower level employees are faceless numbers to many members of upper management and are treated like pawns in a chess game,” said one reviewer.A company with a familiar name that made the list was Sears Holdings, which owns both Sears and Kmart. Sears Holdings ranked next to last in customer service in ACSI’s retail category, ahead of only Walmart. Employees at the company felt that the company had lost its identity and that the workers suffer from morale issues. The CEO, Eddie Lampart, a hedge fund manager made the decision to invest in technology to track customers’ needs. However employees felt that the company would be better off investing more resources in the company’s locations.NCR, the company that manufactures self-checkout machines, ATMs and airport self-service kiosks, made it to number eight on the list. Well, some of their employees did not have many kind things to say about them. They said that much of the company’s technology was out-of-date and that the company still asked them “to carry around cumbersome manuals”. The other complaints were about poor benefits and that the company often demanded a full-time commitment. Number nine was Fiserv, a company which provides information management and e-commerce products to the financial services industry, banks credit unions and brokers. A common theme among the employees who provided reviews was that the company was “needlessly stingy”. “Low pay and paltry raises were frequent gripes and several employees also expressed frustration about less-than-stellar health benefits”. So, now that we know what happens on that side of the pond, how does your company measure up?Yvonne Grinam-Nicholson (MBA, ABC) is a Business Communications Consultant with RO Communications Jamaica, specialising in business communications and financial publications. She can be contacted at: yvonne@rocommunications.com. Visit her website at www.rocommunications.com and post your comments.HOUSE RULES
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Worst companies to work for in 2013
