Used to be great, now is incredibly frustrating - Associate Supply Chain Manager Unilever Employee Review

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.