If you want to make a ton of money at the expense of your personal life and health this is the place for you. The majority of the employees hate working here, but stay for the money. After acquiring Reynolds the parent company (BAT) has slowly pushed down its Ways of Working to the US and this has resulted in chaos. These Ways of Working are inefficient, ineffective, slow, complex and stressful. They don’t work in the US, but London doesn’t trust the US to operate independently. There seems to be no going back though because the legacy management was replaced by rotational secondees who manage with a short-term focus. Everyone has crushing work loads filled with meaningless exercises and unnecessary presentations. Everyone acknowledges this, but nothing changes because nobody is willing to stand up to the powerful people in London. I know this may be hard to believe, but it’s true. The CEO says “cut the crap” so he gets it and the regular workers want to cut the crap, but somewhere in between this breaks down. This needs to be looked into.
To make things worse the execs want people to return to the office instead of supporting a remote work environment. This is not a good talent acquisition or talent retention strategy, particularly when your Glassdoor rating is on a steady decline.
As for Trade. They are paid less than our competitors, have too much work and the executional strategy changes with the wind. Constant POS changes, too many SKU launches, angry retailers. This group doesn’t have any respect for their leadership and now they are facing an uncertain future. Morale has never been lower.
The industry itself has downsides; declining volume, taboo products and heavy regulation. A menthol and/or nicotine ban could bankrupt the company.
