DHL Express Reviews

Pros

Right place at a low lentry level position
No carrer development

Cons

No carrier development
No long term future

Pros

If you like living in a small city such as Bonn, DHL Express Global Head Office is great place to work. It is very international place and work culture is very open. Career opportunities are pretty good as well since they require significant number of qualified people. Offers good work life balance and opportunity to travel around Europe as its centrally located.

Cons

Not many cons. Logistic industry is not the most exciting of all industries so if its your first time then probably you should think before making a move. Otherwise, in terms of company, city, experience, its good place to be!

Advice to Senior Management

Not sure they will read it here. Rather keep this advice for other occassion! ;)

Pros

The colleagues in the same department are united and very team work oriented. That gives you a feeling that you belong to a big family.
Nice working enviroment
Nice colleagues

Cons

Managers are not capable enough

Advice to Senior Management

Find the real talents, esp in operations department
Find appropriate person in HR to recruit the talents.
Use more external talents.

Pros

Great pay, full benefits paid by company, out on the road, no management on your case as long as you do your job

Cons

Management had no respect for the union employee

Advice to Senior Management

Respect your employees

Pros

International Business Atmosphere.
Entrepreneur environment and do it yourself attitude for on the job activities.
Global multinational company with communication at all levels of the organization.

Cons

Salary and Compensation not as good as rival companies within same industry.
Limited training and skills development courses.
Not enough work life balance. Expected to work between 50-60 hours per week.

Advice to Senior Management

Further promote organizational culture and establish employer expectations within this cultural identity.

Intensify employee training and development of soft skills.

Pros

DHL was a great place to work until the company restructured and laid off hundreds of employees both hourly and mgmt. They are now strictly an international shipping company.

Cons

Restructure was done with poor communication. Topline communication and public relations were good but internal customer communication was terrible.j

Advice to Senior Management

Always be up front with all employees during a difficult change to help manage day to day operations and the personnel.

Pros

The benefits are good, the friendships are okay. Many good people have left after the lame salary decrease in January.

Cons

management at the top has no respect for this channel, the change in pay has hurt all employees. behind the scenes money games played with commissions/bonuses. not really a sales job as you have to do the job for billing, collections and lose most bigger sales to other divisions without compensation. No respect for the amount of work done. Our base pay was reduced by almost $10k without any input and in its place a commission structure that rewards the same few people over and over while the rest of us that are tenured employees struggle to make ends meet. The salary decrease really destroyed morale and continues to eat away everyday at the sales people who are treated like crap by upper management beyond the channel. No matter how much The Director tries to make condition better, he has no power as upper management treats him like crap too.

Advice to Senior Management

It doesn't matter as they don't listen. Management makes it quite clear that is you do not like being told what to do start your own company.

Pros

They paid us really well, gave us free cell phones and great bonuses. It was neat to work on projects with people all over the world.

Cons

They ended up laying off 80% of the Scottsdale IT Data Centre staff over a six month period when the company decided to pull out of the US Express (US to US location delivery) market, bowing out to UPS and Fedex. I can't imagine DHL Express Americas exists today in anywhere close to the presence they used to have.

Advice to Senior Management

Thanks for the good times and great experience. I did find there was a bit of a good-old-boy system in place in terms of who got promoted, laid off, etc.

Pros

Not a terribly IQ required to figure out how to be there waiting when senior management arrives at the obvious conclusion on direction. Right place, right time means you can get large bar bills picked up by others. Good place to build early logistics experience for use elsewhere.

Cons

Company tends to talk thru it's hat on advancement and direction. Career paths or development simply do not exist. In a tough market with very focused competition with clear strategies DHL attempts to be all things to all people. That results in a bloated structure at all levels and multiple leadership points pulling in different directions. The follow on is that the company knows no otehr way to increase margins than to decrease employee net compensation over time.

Advice to Senior Management

As there is little product differentiation in express anymore the only remaining differentiator is staff. Talking up employee participation while firing, outsourcing and cutting salaries at the same time as holding massive conferences in India, Germany and the US covers the SMT in something less than sainthood. Wildly varying travel policies don't help. Next time you think about layoffs try impressing people with stepping up and actually sharing pain. Give up the car. Remove a percentage of your pay. Forgo raises for a couple years. You'd be surprised how people react.

Pros

Work Life Balance is something that is considered very seriously and family doesnt take a second place to work related duties.

Cons

The career path structure and methodology followed with the company isnt clear and there is no true caoching or even opportunities to move within or outside of the department the person works in.
High amount of management layer and not enough resources available to actually do the job

Advice to Senior Management

A restructuring effort must always be kept in perspective and even though there have been significant strides to cut bureaucracy and management tiers and make the company more horizontal. There is still much work to be done as there is still a significant amount of upper management and resources tied to pay for them as opposed to focus on reources that could be performing the work.