This company was formed in 1925 and with the arrival of the former CEO in 1993, it has been a solid 30 years of his master plan to “turn ATCC into a functional business model” – please remember this company is listed as a nonprofit but when you get here, you will very quickly find the focus is on profit. And yet at all the companies I’ve worked for, some of which have been around for or less time than the arrival of this CEO, I’ve never seen such a glaring absence of the basic fundamentals of how to not only start and manage projects, but also to maintain the product lines we do have with proper training. They are only now implementing absolutely necessary policy related to project/product management while rapid fire introducing completely foreign product lines (to the scope of this company) and at the same time leaving development, optimization, and production of other more critical existing lines either half-finished, under-supported, or abandoned. The amount of incredibly expensive equipment sitting in labs unused and collecting dust is unbelievable, especially when some of them could equate to the equivalent of 1-5 FTE that they say we “don’t have the budget for!”
The disconnect between upper management and the lab/production spaces is the absolute worst I’ve ever seen in my very long career. What I’ve witnessed is the lab personnel have been incredibly vocal of how they need support, how they need updates, how they’re drowning in work only to have new projects thrown on them to put on top while other resources go unused or under-utilized for purely political reasons. They are routinely disregarded even though proposed solutions are very feasible, resource-friendly, and long term will save money, improve morale thus retention, and lead to a more fruitful and productive company model. It seems a lot of upper management has little to no experience in the sciences they are responsible for managing, and promotions to upper management are woefully mismatched thus creating more tension and disconnect as the teams have leadership who do not understand what the products are that they are in charge of – it is alarming, especially when there are very qualified internal candidates who are more than capable of running the teams. It seems they promote those who will not question the status quo, which is to the detriment of their own company goals, as those trying to improve the procedures are doing it because they really want to help. The hierarchy of departments is nothing short of chaos and it is a headache even for seasoned employees to know who is responsible for what; there is a lot of “I don’t know” in areas where those in charge absolutely should know.
The training is done by people who are barely trained themselves. There are numerous protocols that desperately need to be updated but are actively blocked from these updates – either because the only people who know the new protocols are too busy doing lab work to make them or because upper management/QA makes it sound like the proposer is flagrantly breaking protocol when reality is everyone is because if they follow published protocol, the items will fail. They are hemorrhaging their most experienced workers over incredibly petty rejections of these experienced worker’s requests.
And you can just forget about true innovation - they are going to wave that they are breaking ground on all kinds of new and exciting ventures, but it’s all smoke - they barely have a working manufacturing pipeline let alone the fanfare to truly innovate anything. Nobody is entirely sure what ATCC actually does outside of selling biological standards, nucleic acids, and organisms - you can thank a real good marketing team and a whole bunch of useless business acumen for this.
Know your state/federal disability and employee rights. I’ll leave it at that.
