Speaking only on the lab side of things: The innovation and desire to develop on the R&D side are often sidelined and the reason was usually along the lines of "we don't have the bandwidth". More often than not, these ideas come back months later and are expected to be developed/implemented in a short amount of time, which is ridiculously unreasonable - the kicker is then for the CCO to tell us we needed to have a faster dev cycle. All the lab teams are hardly (if ever) recognized for the meticulous and tedious work they do. Meanwhile, the rest of the company are celebrating seemingly trivial milestones with an Emoji-filled Slack channel when the backbone of their business is grinding away 24/7. Employee retention in the lab teams are atrocious with regular turnover within 2-3 months because management doesn't listen to or value their lab employees. Most of my colleagues have had to fight an uphill battle for their projects to become realized or have their project idea be shelved indefinitely until an urgent need comes up and then all of a sudden it's full throttle for 2 weeks straight - it wasn't sustainable. When we would ask for a higher compensation or promotion backed with results and dedication, it was always met with hesitance and BS reasons for why we were not "ready" for the next level when there was no clear career ladder established. DEI isn't real when leadership positions are mostly held by white or white-passing folks, even if a lot of them are women.
