Pros
- Though marginalized and under-utilized if not VP or above, the individual talent at Petco is incredible.
Cons
- Leadership is completely lacking at Petco. We don’t have senior leaders, we have senior employees who are carving their own patches versus understanding and leveraging their teams existing skills and knowledge, and empowering them to be a part of the solutions and strategy-building sessions that are being held at rapid fire since the new regime got into place. In fact, entire departments currently have no organizational structure as this carving is happening, floating, with pockets of teams having largely no management, guidance, or understanding of when they will. - The revolving door on leadership has a Ground Hogs Day Effect on the underlying business. We are grossly behind where we should be with some basic retail and omni-channel innovations (I.e. voice mail for grooming, BOPUS, POS capabilities, online booking, training tools) as the organization has had to pause with each leadership change to absorb a good amount of do-over, office re-design to fit new leadership styles (ie. RIP Frenchies), and a handful of jazz-hands “our employees are everything” token gestures (ie. music in the cafeteria vs meaningful changes to the worst medical benefits I’ve ever seen). - The benefits are terrible. Graduates fresh out of school pay less for better benefits than we have here. And the out of pocket is alarming, even with THE BEST health care option we have to choose from. You know it's bad when you hand over your insurance card at some locations, and they visibly react to the co-pay and extra charges we brace ourselves for, AND always ask to connect you with someone to be sure they're reading it right. But yawhoo, we can sway to the grooving elevator music in the caf now so,... yeah us. - Employees are not valued at Petco. There is no employee development or growth planning or mentoring at Petco. None. Going to a conference is something you have to beg for in most departments and training is non-existent. Promotion planning or rotation of top talent to develop rounded out skills to retain and grow them is something that does not appear to exist here. If actions are proof, retention of employees clearly isn't of interest to this leadership team - with increasingly more and more confusing organizational structures (or lack thereof), continued lack of clarity on roles and responsibilities, almost no due diligence to understand individual value, contribution, job scope, or ambitions, and a new top down approach to collaboration that feels more like “do as I say”, actions are speaking very loudly. - Consultants are the new “go-to smart employees” at Petco. New leadership hasn’t bothered to survey existing employees... but rather, gone out and layered on a ton of relationship complexity, role sort confusion, and extra work for us by bringing in a bunch of external consultants and agencies to ‘figure it out for us’. Shame on them for the expense and employee churn that is coming from that, not to mention the way it devalues all the work that came before them. History is a college discipline for more reasons than folklore - to be learned from. And we didn't all just wake up yesterday with no memory or good ideas. Perhaps if they could make efforts to understand and remove the 'why we didn'ts' vs. assuming we didn't have the idea in the first place, it would result in less out of pocket to consultants and more retention of talented and passionate employees.
