JD Sports PLC Former [Employee]
JD Sports PLC
Birmingham, New Street
West Midlands
Now where do i start.
First of all I have to say this is probably the worst company I have worked for and I am going to tell you why, I worked in the new street store in birmingham city center as a supervisor. I have been in the company for 4 YEARS!!!! and till now this company still haven't changed anything.
The only reason I am typing this is because I recently saw The Sun mention the top 10 worst companies to work for and JD were one of them. If you type in (en of the ‘worst’ companies to work for in the UK ) then you will be able to see what I am talking about. JD Sports seen this post and one of their representatives spoke out and said:
“We believe that the reviews on Glassdoor do not provide a representative reflection of the standard of our workplaces or our culture.
“The strength of our growing business is testament to our hard working and knowledgeable staff, the majority of which are exceptionally committed to both their own success and that of the company.
“We are committed to engaging with all our employees and invest heavily in their training and development.
“We employ over 26,000 people and the Glassdoor reviews represent an extremely small minority of both past and present employees.”
Now this is a load of s because JD DO NOT CARE ABOUT THERE EMPLOYEES, if they did then people wouldn't be leaving the company so many times a year! If JD counted up how many employees have left the company this year alone then I think they would see how bad there company is and look into why people are leaving so often.
KIOSK SALES:
So I was a supervisor at Birmingham, New Street JD Sports and I would work regular shifts. Trade would start at 9AM in the morning as usual. Now my role is only to supervise the staff and to makes ure there on top of things during trade, now let me tell you now why this company is an absolute mess is because they expect supervisors to motivate the staff which is involved in my role but they expect us to push sales meaning KIOSK or any add ons like CREP PROTECT or INSOLES . if you don't know what kiosks is then I will explain it, the kiosk system is basically the JD Sports online store, if the store doesn't have an item in stock then the staff are meant to offer them an alternative. They will do this for each customer and if there good at interacting with the customer they will order them the item. Now the only thing wrong with this is the staff are killing themselves to get these KIOSKS sales and get nothing in return!!!! A former colleague of mine got £3,000 pounds off kiosk sales alone in ONE DAY, HE DIDN'T GET ANYTHING FOR IT, just a well done and keep it up from management, now in my eyes I see this is really bad because management will push and push the staff to push sales when they are low on kiosk and moan at them and pester them when they don't hit target for the day.
I just couldn't do it anymore and i would find myself going into work and being depressed about being there and that's not what a friendly fun environment is meant to be. I felt stressed and tired from doing majority of the tasks within the store because no one really pulled there own weight. Another con to this company is that they seem to higher a lot of young people and this is good for them because they get to pay them less to save on budget. Now I found this really irritating because i would find myself babysitting the staff to make sure they dont miss behave on shifts. A lot of the mature and older staff would leave because of this and it was really annoying because the people that would leave would tend to be good staff members. In all honesty I have never been in a company before where so much people would leave in a year or a month.
STAFF VALUE:
People wouldn't leave if they felt valued by JD Sports itself but they are left to feel useless and replaceable, now a company this big shouldn't leave there employees feeling like this at all. JD are a fast growing company because of their employees and NO ONE ELSE. This is one of the main reasons why I left the company is because I did not feel valued being there and working for the company. JD have nothing in place to reward the staff for all there hard work, NOTHING AT ALL. NOT ONCE HAVE I SEEN SOMEONE FROM THE COMPANY COME IN AND ASK THE EMPLOYEES WHAT IS IT THEY COULD IMPROVE. In the years I have been at JD I have never seen anyone come in and ask management or staff to how they could improve the company. The company does not engage with any employees to ask what could be changed or improved or anything, and I think this would be for everywhere for the UK.
SEARCHES OUT:
At the end of everyday management would have to search out each individual to see if anyone was stealing. Now i found this very annoying because at the end of a very long day you just want to go home and when you searching out 30 or 40 staff members its just annoying and tiring. I would find myself doing this everyday because I worked on men's footwear and you wouldn't be able to leave if you had not been searched out and it just felt like you were in a prison. Management would have to search each other out and I would find myself sitting down waiting for them to either finish checking standards or counting the daily takings. I would end up sitting there for at least half an hour just to get searched out by someone, which was a pain when you tired and want to go home.
CLOSE DOWN STANDARDS:
Now I don't know if every store has these close down standards but at JD at the end of everyday you would need to tidy everything that is messed up or anything that needs re pricing. Now this is fine but managers or the regional managers want standards to be strict and this will then lead the managers to keep staff behind when things are not done which is not allowed because our contract states that when your shift has ended you are not allowed to work. Now in my store and many stores across the UK they will keep the staff behind until they finish there standards. Now I found this really poor and let the staff out as soon as it hits 9PM, I would then get moaned at by management for letting staff go because they haven't finished their standards which is absolutely ridiculous. This is probably the few reasons why the staff have had enough and end up leaving the company.
HOUSEKEEPING:
Every morning the staff would come in and start house keeping. The house keeping was strict and if things were not done the staff would get told off about it or moaned at by management. Some of the staff do not even know how to clean and some of the places they want us to clean are hard to reach places. JD is a really wealthy company and can't afford cleaners to clean for an 1hour before the store opens!!!! The store alone makes either 30 to 40k and cannot afford cleaners, its ridiculous sickening. The Air conditioner that's' on the ceiling hasn't been cleaned for YEARS!!!!!!!!! and this is what the staff breath in day in day out. The dust that gathers overnight is ridiculous, you would find yourself cleaning the same spots over and over again.
SECURITY:
You wouldn't believe that most stores do not have security, the store that I worked at was a mega store and we would make a lot of money but couldn't afford security to man the door during trade. The staff would get told by loss control to PREVENT the theifs from leaving the store but 10/10 this fails because they end up running out the store and the staff end up chasing them when they are not supposed to. The staff would then get moaned at for not being on there section and get a disciplinary if they were caught on camera not being aware and this was really bad because managment make them do a million and one things to do during trade when really they are supposed to be watching there section.
TIMESHEETS & ROTAS:
Timesheets were a joke, you wouldn't believe that the timesheets were done on PAPER! This is how you know JD do not care about there employees because other wise they would changed this and upgraded there stores but this runs across the UK and is rubbish because the staff would end up loosing there piece of paper and would not get paid! Every time a staff member gets searched out they are supposed to write down the time they started and the time they finished and the total hours. They would then need to put down there own signature and then ask management to put down there signature and I found this really annoying because imagine doing this for 40 staff members each time you work. Other companies have turned over to an electronic timesheet system because it is accurate and reliable and saves wasting paper. But for some reason JD do not want to incorporate this within the business for reasons I do not know, I tried to ask them to implement a really good timesheet tracker named "Tanda" but they just told me 'that they have it in the works' and nothing else. Timesheets would be put through every sunday morning and you would need to manually type in all the hours the staff have worked and think about it, doing this for 30 - 40 staff members is really bad because if put through wrong then people will not get paid the right amount of hours they have worked.
The rotas were also on paper and were put up 2 weeks in advance, the thing about the rotas is that if changed the staff were not notified about it and this was really poor, because staff would turn up for a shift and get sent back home because there shift had changed and they were not told.
HOLIDAY FORMS:
Holiday forms were even worse because staff would get told to fill out a holiday form 3 WEEKS IN ADVANCE and would actually do it 3 weeks before the rota would be done and find out later that there holidays were not authorized. This has also happened to be a couple of times and I just got fed up of it because I couldn't get days off on holiday which i am entitled to.
PAY:
LOW PAY FOR LONG HOURS FOR A DEMAN
