Almost 2 decades, started at the bottom, and worked all the way up
Pros
Benefits are good, the products and technology are cutting edge, and they tend to lead the industry. Diversity and inclusion is pretty good and you never feel like an outsider if you’re different. Training is incredibly thorough and they leave the industry when it comes to training and development but it’s all on the computer/iPad
Cons
Extremely micromanaged. Upper leadership takes the skill out of your job when you have to run everything by them. They do not empower you to run the business like a business owner even though they say they do. HR is sneaky and is not there for the employees which is usually the case, but it’s there just for the company, so reaching out to HR never works out for the employee. HR will make punitive decisions without telling Associates the real reason the decision was made or giving them a chance to explain or defend themselves if they’ve been accused of something that’s not true. Payroll is extremely light so you constantly feel shortstaffed and could deliver much better results with just a little more payroll. An extreme amount of responsibility is expected of you which can be nice if you can balance at all but many of the goals and expectations are very unrealistic, and they always were for the nearly 2 decades that I was there. You have an obscene amount of conference calls and if you’re not performing well, and just one of 50 different KPI‘s, they’re tracking then you could even extra conference calls. Conference calls are seen almost as a punitive measure rather than to help you. You’ll often be told you have a conference call with an hours notice in the middle of a busy day full of patience, and you have to drop everything and leave sales for to be on a conference call. do you have a minimum of two conference calls a week and at times five or six. You have lots of training and development but almost all of it is on an iPad and the technology rarely works. Your Internet goes down all the time and it’s been like that for many years and they refused to fix the Internet in the stores, or even increase the speed for all the technology that they have in the stores that requires so much faster, speed than they provide. The doctors office is 100% computerized so if there’s any technology issues which are abundant and happen every couple weeks, you have to cancel all of your appointments because the doctor would not be able to see patients if there’s any technology issues or the Internet is having problems. There was no back up plan. a lot is asked of you and if you’re competent and really good at your job, you can handle it but the turnover rate is extremely extremely high at the store management level because the support is not provided for all of the expectations and they don’t fix the technology problems that have been going on for 15 years. You have where you can’t service patients or customers whatsoever because of technology problems and you’re still expected to deliver your sales goal even though you can’t even sell a pair of glasses when the system is down which is weekly.