Lidl reviews

The work is physically and mentally difficult. The hours are long and often you feel obliged to work off the clock to hit your productivity targets. It would be unusual for a manager NOT to work a 60+ week. It would probably be viewed as laziness by our peers not to do so. There is an elephant in the room about this in regard to senior management. They know we do this but they are purposely oblivious to the fact once targets are met and there's no trouble. Although vastly improved from when I first started there, the culture can be toxic and intimidating if you are not on the right side of the right people on the right day. This is continuing to improve however. The training can be very hit and miss. I have been through months of zero training and no movement. I have also had the best 6 months of training in my career to date recently. This is store dependent. You can have an excellent manager in one store and a poor one in another. Unfortunately this is the luck of the draw. However you do tend to move stores every few months so this can be positive or negative depending on how you look at it. The college aspect can be a bit of a joke at times. If you treat people like primary school students they will act like it. To improve their harsh image they have hired some 'soft' people who do not suit working for Lidl. Most of these people have ended up getting the sack which makes the whole course very tense and sometimes makes me view it as a poorly thought out joke. This is in stark contrast to what is expected of you when you go to your work block. The college is a good reputable institution however. This course and Lidl in general is not suited to a 'soft' type of person. They would sooner hire someone who will work to the bone for 13 hours a day and hit all their targets but is an absolute psychopath than someone who is great with the staff and fair with working hours but may not have quite the same results. It suits very straight-edged, driven and ambitious people who have the graft to back it up. Confidence is also a must. There is no time to find your feet no matter how good you could potentially be at the job. You will be buried alive. At times, the staff in head office can treat you with extreme contempt and vice versa. The pay for this programme is poor due to the fact that they are paying for you to attend college. You get paid 16k in the first years and 2k up every year after that. You also receive basic health insurance. Lidl in general pay well however. When I finished the programme I moved up to a very respectable salary as a deputy store manager and I will be moving up to the store manager position soon. To truly be successful and liked you can forget about a social life. You must live and breathe Lidl.

A very military-influenced corporate structure based on unquestioning obedience and a hierarchical management structure. Micro-management is the key driver in the business, therefore although Lidl likes to think of itself as a company that makes informed, swift decisions the opposite is in fact the case as managers are given full accountability with zero responsibility - every decision is made at Director level. If the desired outcome is not achieved the blame is placed on lower tiers, even if the decision itself was wrong. Any department head worth his salt quickly works out that the way to avoid being blamed (and sacked) for his director's mistake is to find someone else to throw under the bus. Marriage is just about allowed, but woe betide anyone who starts a family as their loyalty to the company will be called into question when they start trying to leave the office before 7.00pm. In Lidl its all about the optics - more effort is put into making it look like they care for their staff than it would take to actually do so. Note that Lidl on a CV can also cause problems in the job market later, as some firms see ex-Lidl management as damaged goods, since the corporate culture is so at odds with the progressive practices of modern companies.