I spent several years on the marketing team at Favor, which is easily the most volatile department at the company. It’s difficult work, first and foremost - Favor will, quite simply, never be successful. It can’t compete with its national competitors, the HEB advantage has lessened as HEB seems increasingly less interested in supporting the product, and you will fight - hard - to take an inch, only to walk back a foot the next day. It’s not just a challenge, it’s stacking deck chairs on the Titanic that HEB is kind enough to keep from sinking to avoid the bad press.
In the marketing department in particular, leadership ranges from unprofessional to completely unprepared. Newer hires step into leadership roles that are often not equipped for the teams they manage, and it perpetuates a culture of remarkably high expectations and long, long hours.
The prior President of the company was a significant problem. He was heavily involved in marketing despite knowing very little about it, and had strong, intense opinions that were dulled out often as immediate fire drill orders. It’s commonplace in the marketing department to have the “Friday fire drill” to save the business over a C-level executive’s whim.
Sexual harassment went reported repeatedly and wasn’t taken action on for over a year. Leadership in the company hired so poorly they went through several marketing directors in several years, including a particularly rough go with an executive they were forced to fire after resignations started coming in.
Prior employees seem to have trauma bonded a support-group type of relationship of having been on that team, and current employees often reach out to ask if the grass really is greener elsewhere. It is.
It’s a genuinely traumatic place to work, and I will always be genuinely disappointed in HEB for allowing such poor conduct to run rampant.
Tie that all up in a bow with a relatively fresh CEO, sacrificially set forth to helm said Titanic, and his directives continually being unpopular among the workforce. (Take for example, the return to work mandate that bait-and-switched employees that started remote, which was clearly designed to create voluntary exits.)
