A Company in Search of Itself - Chemical Analyst Corbion Employee Review

For a company of its relatively small size, this company is defined by silos. The knowledge is isolated in the headquarters of the company's two former wholly-owned subsidiaries. If you are not working at these facilities, expect to encounter significant resistance in getting information. Culturally, there must be something about the Dutch that makes them petrified of giving even the most benign information to members of the company that produce the product for them. If you cannot harass them on a daily, in-person basis, expect to be ignored for most of your requests. It is the popular suspicion they do so to avoid wide-spread scrutiny of the honeypot culture there. There was a snap to solve the company's problems by going into austerity mode and for most of the business, the products being sold are commodities, that means its simply a race to the bottom. There are plenty of exciting announcements about future products, but they feel like they are being forced by the new board of management (considering they were speaking more soberly about them a year ago, before new consultants were brought on board). Corbion finds itself in a tough position where half of its company is rooted in a very technical, very resource-demanding lactic acid production model that means chemical not adaptable to fermentation or acid production technology requires entirely new infrastructure. This narrows the scope of what the company could pursue, given their self-branding as a biochemicals company. At the manufacturing sites, most people are lifers. There is a culture of status quo. People, understandably, do not want to change the way things have been done because it makes more work than just treading water (which to management and supervisors is very easy). There was some change to the sales structure as it seemed the entire sales department was replaced in one fell swoop, whether it was to firing or quitting, nobody seems to know (see the above comment about silos). Management is very much run on a "drink the kool aid" model where whatever the boss's boss tells them to focus on becomes the most important thing in the world. The "voluntary" behavior-based safety observation program, for instance, was regularly pushed by supervisors and managers, resulting in most employees faking them. Meanwhile, managers would spend hours pouring over the data to identify what safety issues were present, with the burden of solutions being put on the employees (though they had to be approved and scrutinized by management). Unsurprising, given it is hard to place a pipe that everyone finds comfortable to work on. Meanwhile, very unsafe conditions were back-burnered due to the cost of fixing them approaching capital expense levels, completely unpalatable in austerity mode. PPE was also always chosen as the first line of defense, which usually led to the continuing existence of a hazard, and people who were unwilling to wear uncomfortable PPE for the entirety of a shift. But again, because Managers and supervisors didn't have to wear it and nobody was getting injured, there was no push to fix problems with engineering.