Whitbread Reviews

Pros

- Plenty of opportunities to grow and progress your career - An excellent culture - Fantastic people - A clear strategy

Cons

- At times the company is too risk adverse which can impact decision making

Pros

Flexible Good culture Good package

Cons

Slow to innovate Lack of progression

Pros

Trained properly kind staff good management

Cons

Some difficult guests that say there food is to cold

Advice to Management

Take a prob out to guests and show the temperature of the meal

Pros

Great team to work with and great pay

Cons

Bad upper management keeping you understaffed and stressed

Advice to Management

Make sure there is enough staff for the day and listen to employees

Pros

Amazing people to work with

Cons

Too many people so can’t progress quickly

Pros

Flexible and Friendly Challenging Good intentions

Cons

Traffic Location Slow to change Legacy / baggage

Advice to Management

Keep communicating vision

Pros

The people there are generally nice, the atmosphere is friendly and the office is in a great location.

Cons

Con 1: It takes forever to actually get anything done in this place Con 2: The leadership don’t have a clue what they are doing There have been two rounds of redundancies recently - the first for cost-savings, the other as a re-structuring following new people taking over the function. The re-structuring just made things worse. Clever people with a lot of knowledge were made redundant while many of the least competent remained. Most people who were offered a choice between redundancy or taking a new role chose redundancy. The graduates hired on the graduate scheme are usually more competent than the senior people telling them what to do. The amount of people in middle management seems have dramatically increased, yet any developer will tell you that the output (in terms of quality and quantity) has remained relatively unchanged - so it’s a mystery what value all these middle managers are adding. The Product Owners don’t understand their own products. The leadership are incapable of communicating even the smallest of changes - decisions seem to be made by a small group of people in the only office on the floor. On a number of occasions when certain changes were announced and some tried to explain why they were bad ideas, the responses were “this is not a democracy” or “this is just the way it is”. Just one week before Christmas an email was sent out telling employees it was mandatory to take several days of annual leave over Christmas — seemingly no thought is given to actually tell people things like this in advance. Previously a big benefit of working here was that you were at least trusted to do your work — if you wanted to work from home a couple days of week, then that was fine. But employees are no longer trusted. Flexible working and other benefits are being removed. When a new HR scheme was announced to be able to buy up to 5 days of holidays per year (a scheme which the vast majority of big companies have), the only question the Head of Digital asked was “how do we measure the negative impact this has on productivity?”. There are of course worse places to work. But if you are even an average software developer and you want to: - be productive - work with people who know what they are doing - have an opportunity to actually make an impact then you will easily find somewhere better to work than here. Over the last year, most good people have already resigned, with the majority of the remainder planning to leave pretty soon.

Advice to Management

1. Hiring a load of people into meaningless roles does not change anything just because you’ve made an org chart 2. Happy workers are generally more productive workers. Currently most people are very unhappy.

Pros

Excellent training schemes and scope for promotion

Cons

Bad management. unforgiving of days off for sickness. Frequently asked to jobs not in your job description. Expected to drop family ties for work. Expected to work early mornings after finishing at 11 or midnight the day before. No double time or bonus for working Christmas day etc.

Advice to Management

Be understanding and compassionate when staff have children or family ties which may require a little time off or may be late due to factors out of their control