British American Tobacco Reviews

Pros

Highly competitive total compensation packages
Nobody cares about how old you are or how many years of experience you have, only two things matter: Performance & Potential

Cons

Fewer international appoitments opportunities every year.
Considerable gaps between management and non management employees (development and career opportunities, salaries)

Advice to Senior Management

Concentrate the change efforts on what is important and aligned with our long term strategic plan and stop putting funny names on change programmes.

Pros

Large cash rich company, gives big budgets and has lots of slack in system
Lots of mobility options
Salaries ate high

Cons

Very top down
Senior management arrogant and highly ego centric
Massive job cuts annually, and more to come
Diversity is high but listening is low

Advice to Senior Management

Your employees want to assist you in being successful, let them support the growth, versus them being executional monkeys

Pros

- Very structured development and training opportunities
- Good international assignments and project opportunities
- Compensation is great, specially if you go on being mobile
- Working environment is great at end markets. Not the case at regional level or at globe house.
- Quality of employees is top: well educated, good experience, very results oriented leaders and pragmatic

Cons

- If you are not mobile, BAT does not have a long term career for you
- Politics are strong in headquarters and you need to know people and "be visible" in order to get promoted
- Not very critical in terms of the way we do things. Always looking within BAT, rather than outside best practices.
- Leaders manage upwards and most of the time do not look after their people.
- Senior leaders have big egos and are not willing to listen to employees
- Innovation is NOT a BAT competence. Strategies are defined "conceptually innovative" but hardly ever implemented to innovation levels compared to other strong corporations. Innovation is in the growth agenda, but innovation does not drive the whole organization model shape.

Advice to Senior Management

Trust more on your people, really listen to them and take risks relating their contributions. Empower them to make hard business calls. Money is not all, people also need to feel

Pros

Great at entry level
Communication of company's core values/prinicples and strategies
Friendly environment on the surface
Cross functional openness
Many surveys circulated to employees to provide feedback

Cons

-Company values are not lived daily and causes employee confusion between theory and practise
-Inability of the company to hire and retain talent in recent years
-Arrogance at senior levels that they are doing favours to employees by hiring and keeping them; with a take it or leave it attitude
-Fewer opportunities to employees who give feedback and more given to those who play the game and say the 'right' things
-many underperformers are making it to through the ranks, whilst many high achievers are being head hunted and leaving the company
-High level of dishonesty about employees' real scope for career advancement
-Lack of transparency of people movements

Advice to Senior Management

Practise what you preach, i.e lead by example. Live the company's values, they are great. They would be better off the paper and into the daily routines.

Pros

- excellent compensation and benefits
- strong sense of belonging
- very strong profiles
- real opportunities to grow if you join at entry career level

Cons

- career progression exclusively based on visibility and who you know. Hence joining from outside at mid career is a big challenge.
- poor performance management culture
- micro management culture
- very arrogant management

Pros

High starting salary compared to other FMCG companies. Good life, health insurance. Paid gas and car insurance. Annual bonuses.

Cons

No normal private life/work balance. It is hard to work in trade marketing for female employees

Advice to Senior Management

Give proper training to trainees

Pros

Good enough benefits package
Some supportive managers
Free food for staff
some sites have a clinic on site.
tight security

Cons

Alot of politics.
Tend to blame the junior staff for wrong doings
No support system
some security protocol is a pain

Advice to Senior Management

Great talent but lots of fear camouflaged by managers. Motivate staff and listen to the issues with a genuine interest

Pros

They pay very well with great benifits

Cons

There is no growth in terms of career prospects

Advice to Senior Management

More autonomy to staff

Pros

a lot of effort put into development
coaching / mentoring / open feedback culture
friendly atmosphere
transparent decision taking
great possibilities for graduates
structured processes

Cons

strategy extremely individual driven, means changes with every new person at a senior level
beurocracy & massive amount of procedures to follow
industry

Pros

Develops it's people within the organisation.
Very multi-cultural
Forward- thinking in some areas
One of the world leaders in it's fields.
Good environment

Cons

Management sometimes doesn't communicate well
Behind the times in some areas of it's business
It's sometimes not what you know, but who you know in organisation