A truly awful place to work – a toxic blame culture that is ingrained into every part of the business.
They say that the culture of the business is set from the top and that is certainly true for JCB. The senior “leadership” have spent their entire careers at JCB and know no different. They have ground away for years to reach their now privileged positions where it is now their duty to treat employees as minions for them to treat any way they please. Something must have happened in their collective past to give rise to the major trust issues that poisons the whole business – from the ridiculous clocking in/out for all employees except Directors through to all but 5 days of holiday entitlement being fixed.
There is a complete lack of process that results in anarchy – people do whatever they want under the mis-guidance of a “sense of urgency”. Some people run around like busy fools but the vast majority of employees are totally apathetic – clock-in, do as little as possible, clock-out. The major objective is to avoid sticking their heads above the trench getting blamed for having an opinion or an idea to try and improve something.
I joked with colleagues that working at JCB was like Teflon and Treacle – ask somebody for assistance or to do something and the response was pretty much always “no, its not my job” or complete avoidance. If you were able to persevere and get somebody to do something then treacle would prevail and everything would be slow-walked and eventually grind to a halt. A 25 year veteran who survived the abuse to reach the lofty heights of Purchasing Director is now in the privileged position to now dispense the abuse to his minions once made the not-so- Freudian slip “Why would you want to work for a company that changes?”.
If you want to get treated like a child, have no ambition to change anything and don’t want to be empowered to make any decisions then JCB could be the place for you. If that doesn’t align with your values and career ambitions then run a mile!!