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Columbia Sportswear

Engaged Employer

Columbia Sportswear reviews

3.7

67% would recommend to a friend

(1,322 total reviews)
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Tim Boyle

66% approve of CEO

54% positive business outlook

Columbia Sportswear has an employee rating of 3.7 out of 5 stars, based on 1,322 company reviews on Glassdoor which indicates that most employees have a good working experience there. The Columbia Sportswear employee rating is in line with the average (within 1 standard deviation) for employers within the Manufacturing industry (3.5 stars).

Reviews by job title

1K reviews
3.0
Aug 12, 2025
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

- RTO - Decent pay (though only at a certain threshold) - Great co-workers - Employee discounts

Cons

- Senior leadership continues to hire people they like, not people who are qualified for their positions. - There is no training or accountability for senior leaders which creates poor team dynamics. - If you speak up or pushback, you're deemed difficult, uncooperative or having a bad attitude. - Largely only older white males in leadership and the lack of diversity (on all fronts) shows in the work and culture - Very limited or rare opportunities to move within the company or be promoted - The company once valued flexibility and treated people as adults, but senior leadership wants to revert to back to more days in office and being at your desk for 8 hours straight with threats of lack of compliance to this archaic system showing up on your next review cycle - Culture and values are a facade to show-off to shareholders

1.0
Jul 26, 2022

Profits over People

Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

The relationships that were built around the globe. The people are why I stayed as long as I did.

Cons

Beware that compensation is below average. Employees are expected to do a lot with no resources or systems to accomplish what is being asked of them. At one point, I ended up taking on two roles when I was told my backfill would be hired. I was never compensated nor acknowledged for managing two roles with no operational support for 8 months and when continuing to push for proper compensation, job leveling and the backfill, I was told that "leadership expected me to take on the work for more growth opportunities." This was was work I've been doing already for years and shows that if you're great at what you do, you'll only get more work until your burnt out and your mental health detoriates so you end up leaving. The company refers to itself as a "growth company" but will not grow the teams and continue to bottle neck functional experts under incompetent management. You'll find one director making budgeting decisions for 3 functions so there is no equity with the right voices at the table. HR cannot do HR well in their own space because there is no accountability held at the upper management level. Terrible behaviors, passive-agressive attitudes and biases are allowed to continue because there is no structure for accountability when new management is hired. It's a very immature, performative organization compared to where we were in 2018. Performance reviews are broken and bias is given to those who play the game and suck up to certain people. The same people making the decisions for everything below them do not understand the complexity of the functions and operations, nor do they try to understand and decisions made affect many programs and people in doing so. This undermines any work that is tried to be made sustainable, especially when words like "agile" are misinterpreted and never defined. Employee Resource Groups lead all of the DEI efforts. Certain functions have leadership support and advocate for progress in this space, but the majority of leaders brush it off and never make time for it. Retail is driving the majority of the efforts which in turn allows the organization to profit off of these efforts without having to lift a finger. Leadership preaches retention and change management, yet the leaders have no clue how as to how to have retention conversations or provide seamless transition plans. At one point, team members were ghosted by VP's and other management because they didn't want to have the difficult conversations that were happening to teams affected by any changes. When I think of people as "leaders", this is not the organization that I would recommend to work in.

2.0
Feb 24, 2020
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Company culture outside of DTC IT is excellent. There are a good number of events for networking and meeting your colleagues and the overall business is focused on success. It feels like a good balance of retail energy along with classic outdoor industry vibes from the wholesale teams. It is also a financially conservative company which I found to be refreshing knowing that any downturns could be weathered. Benefits are good and I felt the compensation was fair.

Cons

The DTC technology group and it's leadership is completely devoid of any of the pros above. There's no connection to the company values at all. You may as well be working for insurance. Amongst that group the leaders like to bicker and squabble and in many cases make choices which negatively impact the business side with their internal nonsense. This will be masked however in making each and every decision a business decision (despite speaking about IT leadership's business acumen) because of their lack of critical understanding and planning. This might sound like a standard management complaint but it's far deeper as it affects everyone below their teams on a daily basis. There's also very little to no training of career development unless you're trying to get into upper management's inner circle of non decision makers. Along with that, you can't count on any work life balance as there will be no concerns about working 60+ hours regularly month over month. That's often due to the leadership's lack of planning, industry knowledge and/or decision making thus not being able to scope the appropriate level of commitment. In addition, the level of sexism toward females that I witnessed (indirectly) is truly awful. Just beware. In summary, if you are looking to develop your IT skills please look elsewhere at least until a new management team is brought in.

Viewing 16 - 18 of 1,322 Reviews

Glassdoor has 1,495 Columbia Sportswear reviews submitted anonymously by Columbia Sportswear employees. Read employee reviews and ratings on Glassdoor to decide if Columbia Sportswear is right for you.