Do Not Recommend Eastman to Prospective Employees
Pros
By far, the best part about Eastman is the people. I appreciate getting to learn from and work alongside industry leading experts. The collaborative, team focused, and fun culture makes coming into work every day easy.
Cons
Every year for the past 5 or so years, Eastman has made changes to reduce employee compensation and benefits. After a competitive starting salary, raises are small and you quickly end up way below industry average. Promotions are slow and hard to come by. They set a new highest promotion level you can reach if you have a bachelors degree, and if they stick to it, you should only expect 4 promotions in your entire career! They also implemented a forced distribution ranking system that includes a Partially Meets Expectations (15%) and Does Not Meet Expectations (5%) level. It's pretty ridiculous to tell 20% of the company that they are performing below expectations. This has significantly impacted morale and I've never seen so many people dissatisfied and actively pursuing other jobs. After two rounds of layoffs and no promotions, no bonuses, and minimal raises last year, you'd expect some kind of relief for employees this year, but no. Budgets are flat, training and employee development is almost non-existent, everyone is working incredibly hard, but they are still being ranked and not rewarded.
