I was employed with Dunnes Stores in September 2011. During my time with this company I developed skills I didnt know I had which led me to a decision to my future career in Human Resources. I was employed first of all, as a sales operator and then trained as a customer service desk operator. It was here I discovered I wanted to work in HR. I trained as HR administrator assistant to which I will discuss my review on. A typical day started with the HR admin and myself going through the company's computer system to see if there were any error with staff clocking in and out. Then we went through any errors that occured and corrected them. It was then ready for the wages to be calculated. After that, a document was printed to ensure all employees were paid and holidays were covered, any sick pay that had to be paid and so on. A manager was then called to sign off on all the wages. Then we needed to calculate the wages and evaluate if the wages had come in under or over budget.
I learned many skills during this process. I learned that I had to be extremely carefull and know what employee worked what hours nd if there was any changes to their hours that would effect their pay packets. I learned how to be discrete and confidential as I was dealing with employees personal files.I learned that I had to be very organised and to check things more than once and to be cautious as it was peoples' livelyhoods I was dealing with, therefore everything had to be 100% correct. There was no room
Dunnes Stores is a very friendly environment to work in, it is a family owned buissness with traditional values, it is also a shop for all types of people, it is a relaxed place to be and I find working here is very enjoyable, Since Starting working in Dunnes Stores I have learned a lot and feel I know a lot more about the retail Trade and customer service, Working on the customer service desk has thought me a lot , from how to deal with difficult customers , and giving excellent customer service to every customer, also doing staff and management call’s trough the shop, searching for things on the computer . getting barcodes for items, doing change orders to ensure there is enough change in the safe for the other member’s of staff till’s. I have gained a lot of confidence from the customer service desk as you are dealing with the public face to face on a daily basis and while you may get some difficult customers it is a good job to have. While working on the floor here also as a sales assistant I have learned a lot also from leaning how to merchandise new and old stock, doing deliver’s of new stock , doing moves on the shop floor and helping customer’s find what they need eg Sizes colours or just general help. The management at Dunnes Stores are very helpful and always there if you need help , I feel that they are very accommodating and I would never hesitate to ask them if I needed help or did not know how to do something as they are very helpful and fair , they run a tight
Prosfriendly work place, good benifits, nice people, learning alot about retail.
Conshostile customers
5.0
Human Resources Manager | County Offaly | 24 Sept 2012
A demanding and challenging environment
• A Typical Day
A typical day would start with analysing the sales figures from the previous day or week and assessing the necessary spend to achieve margin on both sales and wage estimates. From there I would review information regarding “performance”, so I would review timekeeping and absence and how to initiate corrective action to minimise negative effects on daily operations. Planning rotas is an integral part of my responsibilities to ensure that sufficient requirements are in place to provide excellent customer service.
Next I ensure that any potential issues that may arise from employees are addressed and actioned with an aim to reduce any unnecessary possible future complications. After this is done I then address any other “ad-hoc” requirements.
• What I have learned
I have learned that with everyday come new challenges and experiences that enhance my ability to be fair and to ensure that this is passed onto all employees. I have adopted an open door policy where I am fully available whenever staff or management require advice.
• Our Management
As a manager I acknowledge that excellent leadership skills are essential and from my experiences I have learned to “think on my feet” and if any decision is an incorrect one I will analyse and learn from it. When it comes to directing other employees, I am clear on instructions and expect accurate and relevant responses to these instructions
• My Co-workers
As part of a bigger team than just a HR department, my co-workers an
Dunnes Stores Rathmines - absolute joke to work for. Regardless of how good of a worker you are, you’re treated horribly by the managers and HR. Managers talk about staff behind their backs and make fun of them, they are completely unprofessional and think because they are managers they can do as they please. The managers spoke not just to me but to other people horribly. They pretend they care about the employees mental health but will shout at them and speak to them horribly. If you ask for a minute to sit out because you’re not feeling great you’re told no; “you have a job to do”. They’re horribly understaffed so college students are given ridiculous hours and are just expected to get on with it. They make the problem of being understaffed (which is the problem for HR to deal with) the college students problem and use it as an excuse to keep giving more and more ridiculous hours. You’re told your hours will come down in a week or two and then all of a sudden it’s two months later and nothing has changed but you’re shut down wherever you try to talk to HR about it. All in all, the managers are horrible people who take out their angers verbally and aggressively on college students and if you stick up for yourself you’re told you have an attitude.
The highlight of working in Dunnes was the shop floor and till staff. Everyone was so friendly, polite and kind and this created a great buzz around the workplace where despite the managers behaviour, I felt welcome and accepted. I’
People who actually do their job get ignored, while people who jump off tills to hide on the shop floor essentially get promoted to self-service, where they stand around all day unless another member of staff or a customer needs them. That includes slackers working there much less than the people who do their jobs.
I worked there a year, and a girl who joined 6 months after me and had only worked there 3 months got given self-service duty. One evening I was guilted into working later as we were apparently short on staff, and yet after only 5 minutes of being on till, the two girls who were supposed to be working late jumped off and disappeared onto the shop floor. The managers are friendly and approachable, but utterly useless in dealing with these wastes of space and money. You are basically doing several people's jobs for one person's pay. I still remember the day 2 or 3 of us were struggling with the hoard of customers at the tills, wondering where the rest of the staff were, only to turn around and see at least 5 of the girls laughing and chatting away at self-service.
Do not work here unless you are somehow so gold hearted you don't mind being taken advantage of. If you already work here, don't be taken advantage of. If you see other people jump off tills, do the same when you have a chance. You won't get in trouble if the others don't, especially since you're one of the few people who actually do their job, and eventually the managers will be forced to do someth
A typical day for me was operating the checkout dealing with customers and their inquiries, and dealing with products and how they were displayed the term that described it to me was "facing off".
Over time i learned that to work in this environment it took a set of skills from each person, Communication skills was the most important, always had to be polite smile and thank customers on a day to day basis.
Management I feel was very good they treated their staff with respect very good with hours and for example one time I was given hours that I found difficult to work and when I brought it to their attention and explained to them that I could not work those particular hours (due to family emergency) they had no problem and asked me politely what hours could I work or if I would prefer to take the day off. I had the up most respect for the management at Dunnes Stores.
There was not really a particularly hard part to the job everything was pretty basic but if i had to say something that probably caused some difficulty would be when taking in deliveries and putting them into the backup fridge then noticing that there was not enough room in fridge/freezer for all of the products we had to resolve the situation by taking products of one pallet then adding them to another in order to create more space but we would have to be quick in order to not let the products defrost etc.
The most enjoyable part to the job was the other staff everyone got on well with each other and on th
I have worked at Dunnes for awhile now, I can say it has good pay for a student but apart from that it is a nightmare.
I work night pack, your job is to pack the store from close until whatever time you are done.
Shifts start at 6pm and there is not a set finish time you could be there until 4am if necessary.
Definitely not the job for someone who wants to have a schedule and or life.
The majority of managers are very mean. They talk behind everyone’s back and most just stay on their phones in the stockroom and just walk around chatting to each-other whilst everyone else get hassled for not doing work etc. I have never seen a more unprofessional attitude in a work environment. Considering our Dunnes is one of the busiest in Ireland.
If you have exams and try to get that date off if they don’t like you they will try convince you to do your exam at lunch time in work. It will be a constant battle between you and managers for time and flexibility. If you call in sick they will basically say you are fit to work even if they have no idea how sick you are. I was once forced to come into work and was threatened that I would lose my job and I have only ever called in sick a few time in my years in Dunnes.
On top of that being a night pack staff member you will more than likely be blamed for most things wrong with shop so if the day time staff don’t pack at all and you don’t fix their aisles, you will be blamed.
I won’t lie there is maybe one manager in Dunnes that everyone enjoys ha
It was a fun workplace sometimes with other co-workers but managers are strict so a lot of the time you need to be on your best behaviour and get your work done. A typical day you would clock in go to your manager and he or she would tell you where on the shop floor you will be working. So you go outside and see if there is any delivery of products that you are working on there and see what products need to be packed on the shelves and you also have to look at the dates on many products and rotate the earliest stock to the front of the shelf so products wont be sold to customers out of date and that can be very time consuming. You then for the whole day go up and down from the stock room with products and pack them on the shelves until the shop closes. Then you face-off the whole shop with other workers to make the place look nice and clean for the next day where you do it all over again. It is a very repetitive job and tiring at times and that's the hardest part of it all. You really need to make your own fun if you don't want to go insane. The co-workers and some managers are enjoyable to work with and are very friendly so there's no problem there. The most enjoyable parts of the day is having some fun with other co-workers. All in all being a Sales Assistant is a very hard job and you will always be kept on your toes but there can be fun times also.
Pros4 week holidays during the year, friendly and fun co-workers and at christmas you get vouchers for dunnes stores
Consvery long hours some days, some strict managers, lifting/pulling heavy loads and very hard work
After working in Lidl for five years, I thought Dunnes would be a more relaxed environment eg. I worked in one of the busiest Lidl stores in Europe. then worked in Dunnes grocery dept in a small town, Dunnes had three times the amount of staff and were lucky to see a tenth of the customers in one week that my previous store saw in a day. There were over eight managers in the grocery dept and the majority of them were disgraceful. Employees are treated like idiots, treated like dirt, not allowed to go to the bathroom during shifts. There is no communication among the managers, so when a sales assistant is asked to do two or three different things by two or three different managers things start to fall apart, the blame falls on the store assistant for not completing tasks properly. The manner in which management speak to staff and sometimes customers is unacceptable. Dunnes is a workplace in which bullying and harassment of staff has been institutionalised among management. There were days when I walked in the doors and passed store assistants crying before they had even started their shift because they knew it would be another day off being undermined by management. Disgraceful place to work, if any of those managers were taken from Dunnes and given a job in a Lidl store, they would leave a little yellow puddle between their shoes, because they cannot handle the smallest amount of stress and they then redirect it as aggression and condescension towards staff.
Anyone who worked in retail knows the ups and downs of this kind of work. Working in Dunnes is no different in terms of customer service, checkout operating etc. Workplace culture rely on people you're working with. Lots of the time you'll be doing other people's work. Company does not give lots of space for improvement, for developing or for climbing on career ladder, so keep that in mind. It's good as first job, for a student or for long term staff. In general staff is not viewed as an asset.
Hardest part of the job is dealing with managers, since many times they will do anything they can to actually interrupt your work (they hate me serving the customers) or they will give you contradictory tasks to perform (one manager ask to get on the till, other wants you to look after delivery - same time).
Pay: payment was little bit more than min. wage at that time and pay rise was silly - cents per year on my contract.
For quite sometime I loved to work there. Than management changed and I simply wouldn't go back there.
Hours: it was time when people do just 15h and HR refuse (!!) to sign Social Welfare papers so you can get some support or help. Other time you will be constantly asked to stay longer and you are expected to agree at all times. Constantly they will make you stay on the floor an extra few minutes, which wont be paid! It's not accidental occurrence- it's rather norm. At the end of the day I've signed up with Union, due to the way they were treating staff.
A typical day at Dunnes Stores is basically doing everything we possibly can to meet the customers needs and wants and helping them with anything we can. I work on the tills which has a lot of cash handling, so therefore I think my cash handling skills have increased over the years so I am very confident with that. We also have to go into our stock room each morning and put out different sizes of clothes that have been sold or if there is an empty gondola (table) and there is stuff in the stock room to go out we usually merchandise the gondola so that its suitable and matches in with whats beside it. To help the customers in every way possible, if we don't have a size of clothing that they want we can go out of our way and phone up another store directly and ask if they have that specific item and if they can hold it back in their store. We also price the stock and put it out if we've got a delivery that day. Occasionally on Sunday's one person is on for 2 hours themselves in the morning or 2 hours in the evening for tidying time, which I do quite a lot. At the end of the day we tidy the shop floor by sizing and putting everything back in its original position, we don't do any cleaning except if something has been spilled by a customer for health and safety reasons or the occasional behind the till clean as we have cleaners that come in every morning. Throughout the job we do a lot of customer service which I'm used to and I am quite good at as I passed a 'Customer Care' subj
Prosgood referee
Consnot as much hours as hoped for
Questions and answers about Dunnes Stores
How often do you get a pay rise at Dunnes Stores?
Asked 2 Nov 2022
yearly
Answered 26 May 2023
Every 6 months
Answered 23 May 2023
What benefits does Dunnes Stores offer?
Asked 25 Jan 2022
10% staff discount
Answered 14 May 2023
20% off store products
Answered 12 May 2023
What is Dunnes Stores holiday leave policy? How many holiday leave days do you get per year?
Asked 16 May 2019
4 weeks
Answered 12 May 2023
21
Answered 11 May 2023
What is a typical day like for you at the company?
Asked 23 Nov 2022
horrible
Answered 12 May 2023
Busy
Answered 8 May 2023
What is the promotion process like at Dunnes Stores?
