Great experience working here but can be very stressful and unrewarding
Pros
I started as a part time consultant and was promoted to a center manager after a few years. I think it's really inspiring to know that some of the executives have started at the bottom and climbed all the way up. You'll be chasing tons of metrics and there's always an opportunity to improve somewhere. In the information age, FedEx has found a way to track just about everything - not just your package. I can't state that strongly enough, *everything* is tracked. FedEx Office is primarily a printing company despite the FedEx name, but you're going to learn about shipping as well. A lot of the customer base has put something off until the last minute and is putting their stress on you to resolve it so in order to last you're going to need to have patience as well as great customer service. You're certainly going to have a lot of stories to tell each day. I've learned how to manage customers much better relative to when I started and of course my employees as I climbed. This is a job where you will always learn something new no matter how long you've been with the company. Unlike a lot of management jobs, this position can be somewhat physical (which I like) due to the amount of items being not only shipped but also packed. After a few months you might get the feeling that you've 'seen everything' but you never will. Even if you read my review and never work here, ask any employee what their craziest shipment (or refused shipment) was and you'll be wowed. The company has also done a better job in my years there removing the haze that separates corporate from all of the retail stores. It's really good that more people from corporate were promoted from the field and not external hires that aren't aware of what's going on at the ground level. Some of the newer initiatives such as Pack Plus (packing solutions for larger and/or more valuable items) and Print and Go (a cloud based email server that lets you basically print from your phone or tablet) are great. Printing has declined since the Kinkos days largely due to digitization, but the company has been making some good changes to address this.
Cons
The company is extremely micromanaging. All my new hires have to be observed at all times even after a tremendous amount of training because they will make mistakes early on that could potentially have huge consequences. The job can be very stressful because there's almost always an issue. Whether it's a machine breaking down, a customer demanding a refund over something silly, someone who can't log into their email because they don't know their own password, or a package being delivered late (which we have no control of once it leaves the store) - there are certainly days where you can just be dumped for an entire shift. The company has a checklist or policy for everything which can be good for structure, but is unrealistic to have your employees that make just north of $10.00 hourly to follow all of the protocols let alone do their job well elsewhere. Every issue is another checklist, I really wish there was a way to focus on the big picture and use the checklists only if you have that issue. The annual raises are extremely low and don't recognize success - this is a spot where the company really needs to change. My weakest employee received a 2% annual raise, my best received a 3.25% annual raise the same year. If I had a shining star of greatness employee they might have received a 5% raise. In other words, this is normally a difference of about a dollar a day which can't even buy a cup of coffee. A well trained employee can bring in hundreds more dollars each day than a mediocre one yet their rates or pay and incentive are virtually the same. The cost of rehiring someone is immense and yet the best employees aren't rewarded annually and often leave to find something better elsewhere when they could have been retained if they received an appropriate rate of pay. Despite being a printing company, learning the printing system takes at least 6 months and generally a year. A great employee can start entering basic orders after 3 months. Imagine working for a company and you (and you're great right?) can't even charge your core product correctly for three months yet you've already worked there the entire time. This doesn't work with a high employee turnover and my best analogy is that the system is like learning an old version of Microsoft Windows. It makes sense once you finally learn it, but until then it's Greek. There's a lot of stuff in it that's extremely outdated (beeper actually appears as a customer contact method in a pulldown menu) and it's also really clunky and frustrating to make some adjustments. We have some huge corporate customers that will print numerous 1-2 page sets of documents and we end up printing countless internal pages that have to be signed off on which wastes paper and time.