Alliant Energy reviews

Little direction from senior leadership unless you work in or near the Madison or Cedar Rapids offices. A lot of preaching about the culture but it is more of the do as I say not as I do mentality. HR and senior leadership is heavily focused on DEI to the point that one of the corporate goals is to have 60% of senior leadership women or a person of color. I have nothing against hiring any of these candidates if they are qualified. Unfortunately this mindset puts personnel in leadership positions with no prior experience in the field and little interest in learning what the field employees actually encounter. Higher level meetings openly discuss the goal of rates of return for the investors and employees and customers seem to come last. Hired a new CEO, apparently paid her $1.7M in a moving allowance, and now voluntarily separating 240 of their most experienced employees to save money with no plans to rehire most of these positions. Little direction to remaining employees, just heard the “this won’t create more work for others” bs.

Reorganizations happen every 2-3 years. If you want to constantly worry about job security, an office job at Alliant Energy might be the place for you. Engineering pay is not competitive. We invest time and money to train engineers to Levels 1 & 2, only for them to leave after 3 years for better pay and senior positions elsewhere (and honestly, who can blame them?). Now we’re even paying the same engineers more as contractors at Ulteig. But since contractor costs are a capital expense, it looks better on the books. HR is disorganized, and the interview process is confusing. Interviewees often get automated calls about interviews, but many phones flag these as spam and the robocall doesn't leave a voicemail. As a result, I often have to follow up with candidates myself, since HR won’t do it. It also took three months just to update the job descriptions before we could post positions. The core issue, though, is the company’s values. Investors always come first. Leadership, from the director level up, seems to care more about financials than the ratepayers or employees. The focus is on keeping a clean operations and safety record, securing government grants, and building projects funded by those grants. Unfortunately, this often leads to increased O&M costs, which are then passed on to the ratepayers. But who cares, investors are happy right? Management has been in steady decline. About five years ago, the decision was made that managers no longer need technical expertise. As a result, we’re left without engineers because we won’t pay them competitive wages. Managers lack understanding of technical issues, so the burden falls on the field to handle all the engineering work. This is a recipe for long-term disaster. Leadership has also lost touch with employees. Vacation benefits were cut, with the justification that they were "too good" and now align more with what ratepayers receive, making it "fairer for the rate payer" Instead of setting a standard for a healthy work-life balance, they’ve lowered it. The cuts were made to avoid paying out unused vacation when severance packages were given to laid-off employees. Lastly, the company swung heavily in favor of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives, to the point that if you were a white male, it was nearly impossible to land a management, director, or VP position. Leadership was very transparent about the diversity numbers they aimed to hit.