Philips Consumer Lifestyle Drachten Review

Seen with an open day, wonderful company and very clean, beautiful innovative products, an asset to Friesland

Worked for half a year (LOC). really enjoyed myself there.

Very nice and large innovative company. Millions of production and all that in the field of shaving. Have been working there for years with great pleasure. Philips is also a very important employer for Drachten.

This is a review about working environment within Philips Drachten, not about the products, which are (still) very good, at least for now.

The organisation is very immature with people preferring to gossip behind your back and try to push you out of projects and meetings rather than talk to you directly about your (perceived) differences. The company is clearly run by either incompetent and apathetic management or alternatively management who is actively trying to run the company out of business.

The working environment is best described as an airport terminal rather than an office. You get a random desk somewhere in the middle of a big room with people walking around and sometimes shouting or having coffee meeting and laughing behind you and watching videos out loud. Okay if all you have to do is check some emails and update your calendar but not for any kind of real intellectual work. They have good coffee though so perhaps an idea is to just drink the coffee and browse the net, which seems to be what a lot of people do there. This is fine for lazy people who like to get paid to drink coffee and sit somewhere but not really a challenging and stimulating environment. The challenge is perhaps in having to deal with the childish people working there.

The company prides itself internally with diversity and innovation yet it is incapable of handling either. Working style and procedures are rigid and old fashioned and people tend to have a herd mentality. If you are different with educational background than the majority or have different working and thinking style it is perceived as negative and that you must adapt to the inside the box way of working and thinking which is quite opposite to environment for innovation. Intellectual and personality diversity is not tolerated. This is interesting because the company is trying to appear that they do by spending money and time on expensive training programs to determine every person s working and thinking style yet they do not use these results at all. This is an excellent example of fluffy ideas that fall short of execution.

Projects are constantly delayed due to extremely unrealistic ideas of time and deadlines that do not take into account any realism and what ifs or indeed past experience. However every time a project is delayed it is a surprise for everyone and the response is to make again the exact same unrealistic plans. There does not appear to be much thinking or learning involved. They are however very quick to try to find someone in the team (who does not have herd mentality) to blame for this and in absence of such they blame each other. It is often a theatre, when one can sit back and enjoy it with some distance (perhaps with the good coffee that is provided).

When the company has financial problems the result is not to accept lower profits or cut the salaries of executives but to cut innovation projects and fire some people. This insures that the innovation department is in a constant flux of new hire and fire and struggles to retain and build knowledge. It also ensures that in a few years there will not be many new developments or different products, which means the problem with the competition, will be even bigger. It also means that despite financial problems on the balance sheet the company appears to be making profit, so the stock price goes up instead of down, which in effect means lying to investors and stealing they re money. On top of that to support this scheme large portion of the hires are on temp contracts via agencies and they get rid of them easily. Basically, it is a very socially irresponsible company.

The mid and low lever managers have limited concept of leadership and management and all they do is say some fluffy corporate jargon about excited work together at weekly meetings. They often talk big about how they disagree with the way the company is being run but do not try to do anything about it as they are clearly scared of senior management. When faced with non-standard situations or employees they have no idea how to respond.

I had bought a Ladyshave from Blokker and it was reduced to 34.50. You would get another 15 back from Philips. You then had to send a copy of the purchase receipt plus the barcode. You should read how to do that on the Philips site on the so-called "the weeks for you: Beauty. Unfortunately there was nothing to be found. After many detours I got a gentleman on the Chat. He sent me a link. and that didn't make sense. Eventually I was able to fill in a form on the Internet, but there you had to take a photo of the purchase receipt. Since I don't have a photo camera, but a video camera, the party was canceled. After a lot of research I got a miss from Philips on the phone and I asked for an address where I could send everything to. She did not want to give it to me and kept me talking unnecessarily. After a lot of insistence by saying that this phone call was getting very expensive, she filled in a form together with me, so that it would all work out well. Well forget it, because it had to be sent to her to PO Box 81, 3900 Overbelt. In the end I had to pay 2.56 for sending and some outlines my surprise; I got everything back with a slip of the Post on it that they had left this address.

Well Philips, you can make great advertising, but keeping your promise and giving a false address is very bad!

I hereby warn people who want to buy a Philips device, because not to do, because you will be cheated in life. Never, never again anything from Philips !!!