Pros
Most employees meant well and wanted to pull their weight to make things work. Great sense of community and friendship rarely found in a business. Advancement opportunities were certainly available and within reach for some, though many opportunities will require an employee to relocate many times within their career.
Cons
-Incompetent management that does not properly apply company-wide policies equally to all employees. For example: Break policies dictating that employees are limited to 2 separate 15 minute breaks per shift won't be applied to those who wish to get up and smoke several times per day, even if their excessive breaks in a call center environment lead to less work performed by the individual. Severely under-performing, downright incompetent employees who bring down their entire department and do not pull their weight are allowed to drag morale down and continue to receive a paycheck year after year while customers receive a poor experience and colleagues are left to pick up the slack for no compensation whatsoever. Repeated and clearly documented offenses delivered to management's desk went straight to the recycling bin. Management doesn't have the guts to deny unreasonable PTO requests, resulting in employees stockpiling their Paid Time Off until the last month of the year (knowing full well their request for a whole month off will be approved), which leaves their colleagues short-staffed for an entire month. Considerate employees who spread their PTO throughout the year get nothing in return. Large projects and the critical decisions contained within are decided without much thought, planning, or proper foundation in place, leading to large scale failures that could have been seen by a blind man. Once again, the bottom rung customer-facing plebs are the ones who get to deal with the angry end users who are rightfully dumbfounded by the complete lack of thought that causes such failures. Paying for proper business management software licensing is absolutely out of the question, leading support representatives without appropriate tools to best assist their end users. The support experience suffers and what could have been a simple remote PIN/Password reset or remote assistance support session turns into an extensive and frustrating experience for all parties involved. Who cares if the end user is livid and the support representative is miserable due to being belittled and berated on a daily basis for management's refusal to fund proper tools? As long as Rick Taylor and the executives cut costs and maintain their salaries, right?! Simple problems that other organizations of a similar scale would handle with ease are completely and utterly screwed up because large scale issues are handled as though the company is a small business. Communication between teams and departments are non-existent at times, leading to significant system-wide changes that are pushed into production without any consideration of the affected teams and their end users' needs. On a minimum of a weekly basis some form of application or server change prevented access to a critical service or feature for hours to days that could have been avoided through simple communication. I will never understand how an entire IT department of presumably qualified individuals would be incapable of following the simple yet critical instruction "NEVER PATCH THIS APPLICATION SERVER" a single time in the three years I worked for this company. Large scale outages are not communicated to the affected users upon identification. Even the worst IT consulting firm will send out a notice to advise clients of a known outage and to provide an ETA for resolution. At Konica Minolta this is an alien concept. At best, an IT outage's existence and identification would never be acknowledged, but a useless "This problem is resolved" email would be sent company-wide several hours after the issue had begun. By this time, employees have already wasted their time calling in to report the issue, only to be told one-by-one that it is a known problem and being worked on. When a company cannot even be bothered to send a pre-emptive warning to its employees to let them know that there is an outage that is being addressed, you know something is seriously backwards. General consensus around the water coolers from employees and customers alike is that Konica Minolta and its machines are infuriating to work with and simply inferior to other brands on the market. It comes as no surprise given the way management handles business. It's all one half-baked rush to cut costs and maximize profits at the expense of the customer, the employee, and the overall product and service provided.