Benefits have decreased each year in my 5+ years with the company. Senior Management keeps using the ever mysterious 'industry standard' for reducing benefits citing it keeps Battelle competitive. I find humor in this in that the industry standard is always cited to lower benefits for the staff but is never conveyed as to what companies are included in the industry standard. It's even more interesting when Senior Management then claims no other company does not can do what we do. If that is the case then how does the industry standard apply to Battelle; can't speak out both sides of your mouth. Pension is gone for most employees. In my case, my pension is frozen so that it will be the exact same now as it will be in 30 years while the company makes money off of the investments. Management doesn't invest in employees, my direct management hasn't engaged with our team in 6 plus months and has no clear strategy for how the team will rebuild or at least maintain; I've also heard this is the case in a few other divisions. Senior VP and CEO have not clearly articulated the new strategy to all the staff. That being said the strategy is to do more philanthropy, focus on lab ops, and contract research. All of these are what Battelle has been doing for years. All of the success to date for positive increases in the bottom line have been due to the sale of an asset (land, one time benefit), collecting what was due/owed to Battelle from our clients (good business practice, better AR accounting), and winning a new national lab (which was captured and pursued by the previous CEO and Sr leadership team). So far no major wins have been attributed to the new leadership team even with the DoD having large pockets in FY18 (as our CEO stated at an all hands in the spring ). In fact, the weekly senior VP email mentions occasional wins but no longer mentions dollar amounts tied to those wins, my assumption is that is due to the win not being of significant sizes like Senior Management had preached early on in their tenure (9-figure deals). Morale is extremely low with no turn around in sight. I always take morale as a good indicator of how a company/group/team will do going forward. If you have a positive outlook and a clearly defined strategy that you are starting to execute, morale will start to improve. That's not currently the case here. Budget numbers for FY19 have yet to be set; but business units are supposed to hit 'their' targets. Senior management has no issue with staff turnover as they think everyone is replaceable (which is true to some degree) with cheaper, younger staff. This is fine as attrition is normal in any business, however, the brain power and knowledge of staff leaving is in most cases very hard to replace with a new junior staff member.
