If you are working in Beauty Care Professional, it feels like you don't even exist within the larger Henkel machine. In fact, BCP employees often joke that it must be nice to work for Henkel, but we will never actually know.
It seems like all the benefits promoted by the company, such as short-Friday, home-office and flexibility, are just enjoyed by other business units. Meanwhile, Beauty Care Professional leaders expect you to have no personal life and be on call 24/7, no matter your position. I've had countless meetings that went well into the night, ending at around 1am. Sometimes it was a virtual meeting, in which leaders were in a different time zone and, therefore, weren't affected by it being so late. But this has also happened in person, to the point we had to use our phones to navigate the office, because the building had already shut down the lights.
Country leadership is insecure, micromanaging is the norm and leaders and can't make decisions, but won't give even managers the autonomy to make them themselves. This causes a constant feeling of uncertainty and fear amongst employees of all levels.
Salary is low and benefits are poor if you are not a senior manager (MC3A) and above. Even as a manager (MC3B) Henkel had the worst health care insurance since before a position as Analyst back in 2005.
However, Henkel's HR loves to promote the company as caring, worried about employees, having great benefits and being committed to employee well-being. Many times during the pandemic I've heard leaders saying that we should be thankful we still had our jobs - as if Henkel was doing us a favour and not actually paying for the very hard work we were putting in. The reality is that Henkel's main benefits, related to flexibility, weren't really enjoyed by most employees within the Beauty Care Professional unit and, with the pandemic, this is no longer a selling point for Henkel anyway. Most companies now offer similar flexibility benefits to their workers.
The reality is that employees are overworked, getting physically or mentally sick, are under immense pressure as if they worked for meritocratic corporations such as AMBEV, however they are not compensated as such.
And forget about promotions. Unless you are willing to relocate to a worse country and/or do work that you are not really interested in, there is no chance.
