Wayfair Employee Reviews about "work life balance"

Cons

Didn’t support work from home pre covid. Unknown how is it going to be afterwards

Cons

Culture has changed in the past few years. A lot of bureaucracy. Offer not competitive compared to other tech companies, making it impossible to hire top talents, and also causing attrition problems.

Cons

Work life balance can tilt askew and sometimes you just have to recognize that you can't do it all. Often you're loaded up with much more than you can reasonably accomplish so you have to decide what's going to slip. Salaries are not terrific, especially for entry level. You're in it for the start up experience and the camaradarie, (plus the quarterly parties & monthly team drinks) not the salary. We need better career path planning and more concrete review criteria, but I hear some of that's in the works. The problem is, roles are constantly being created and changed, new groups are forming and so by the time you define a career progression within a department, it's obsolete.

Cons

Like many others have said pay is an issue and the reason most people leave. The company is beginning to right size things but it's still not anywhere close to market and has not adjusted salaries enough to the increasing cost of living in Boston. You also see a lot of bitterness and strife with certain employees who expect a lot of the company very quickly. The reality is that maybe 20% of entry level employees will get promoted, and you have to prove yourself worthy of these promotions. People who are not recognized get unhappy and the attitude can spread.

Cons

There is a culture of promoting someone into a position, promising a future pay adjustment and then not observing it yet overloading them with work. A carrot will then be dangled about 'proving oneself' to achieve the role & recognition one should have got in the first place. This is deliberate policy as a cost saving measure. Where opportunities do exist for entry level staff – such as moving into team leader or assistant Manager roles – these have promising staff placed into them on a ‘trial’ basis with little or no feedback on their performance, no payrise, no formal recognition and no formal training. One of the core values of the company is Transparency. It’s like a bad joke. Constant danger of job/scope creep with all the risk and no reward. Culture of promising employees being assigned laterally and then overloaded with work Wayfair is a corporate cult, non-believers are not readily tolerated. Frequently at manager level there are discussions on who is “in”, and who is “out”. Employees who are deemed to not “get it” are quietly deemed to be misfits. At some point in your time at Wayfair you either start drinking the Kool Aid or take the red pill or find yourself completely at odds with the company. Pushback is grudgingly tolerated, while failure to complete all tasks is not acknowledged correctly and is usually blamed on poor time management. In Customer Service – where the bulk of the company's employees work - salaries are uncompetitive at all levels outside of senior Management. There is a major issue with people doing just enough to not get fired and these freeloaders drag back the potential bright stars. In my group, no significant promotions have occurred in over a year despite significant growth. When they do occur, promotions or appointments are not announced which is probably due to guilt over the blatant favouritism displayed in some of the appointments. In fact, this deters many people applying for openings as they are felt to be a foregone conclusion. At ground level you are nothing short of a Unit and deeply immersed in Phone Hell. All schedule deviations are monitored down to the minute and you live and die by your metrics. The position of the company is that it operates a ‘meritocracy’ but as far as most of the employees can tell the company only pays lip service to this and generally uses the concept to its advantage as above. In terms of expectation above junior supervisor, it is genuinely very hard to know what is expected of you. Scope and job creep is a continuous danger and employees are regularly and deliberately overloaded with work, from the bottom up. There is a deliberate policy of understaffing and underresourcing. Employees are not always conscious of all the benefits they are entitled to. Most employees genuinely have no idea if the company has a policy for registering HR grievances, in fact some locations do not have a HR resource. Contracts are not periodically updated to reflect changes in position, roles or salaries. There is very little documentation to outline best practices with troublesome employees. No development plan exists for anyone outside of loose target guidelines in manager roles, and apart from a contribution to further education there is little or no opportunity for formal development in house as all training is job-only focused. The approach to training is best described as “scattergun” and is very reactive. At Managerial level it is absolutely non-existent, you receive no formal training, and gain no transferable skills or certification apart from the experience you are gaining. Unless you are lucky enough to advance and continue doing so you will be at a dead end very quickly. The hiring process is incredibly loose and selection procedures can be poor. There is no policy to proactively manage burnout which is a major issue in the company. The approach to training is best described as “scattergun” and is very reactive.

Cons

Toxic environment in regards to senior leadership. Shady decision making that goes against my morals. They say work life balance is valued but I ended up working 12 hours a day for no return.

Cons

None that I can think of

Cons

This is not a company to work for if you want a work life balance. I regularly work 7 to 7 Monday - Friday

Cons

Change is constant and not always needed. They claim to be transparent, but that simply isn't the case. They say they do market studies on pay and benefits, but almost always the pay is below the national average. Working conditions are stressful and confusing because most of the time you have no idea what's going on. Their review process is incredibly unfair and they move people around just to fill "buckets on the curve." They often ignore how managers rate their people and employees suffer as a result of the process. In most departments there isn't a clear career path. They also have a culture problem partly because there are a great number of employees who have never worked for anyone else. That makes for an environment where people aren't willing to listen to new ideas and have the frame of mind "this is how we've always done it." That goes for senior executives and senior managers as well. While they do have decent benefits, employee purchase discounts aren't great with the best discount being 50% off open box items. They also require a lot of employees to travel, but only issue company credit cards to directors and above. So if you have to travel and you aren't above the director level you have to bear the expense and then submit for reimbursement which is a problem given there are a lot of people who simply don't have or can't qualify for a credit card. That includes international travel. Regarding pay, they pay inside sales reps on the B2B side well below what other companies pay and commissions are very slim. Overall they claim they are an "employer of choice" and they have "paid" to have that distinction in their home city of Boston, but that isn't the case in other offices around the country.

Cons

Some team may be too small and performance review may be biased based on your manager's personal opinion/standard. Work life balance is just okay as most people (on my team) there do not have kids.