Profits over People - Anonymous employee Columbia Sportswear Employee Review

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.