These are my views and opinions of some of the issues that exist in the company/regional offices, please note this does not come from a place of bitterness as I left the company on my own terms, I am writing this to inform others of the issues I felt needed to be addressed.
Career Opportunities- To me it felt very dead end. Unless you have Seniority in this company, you will most likely not go anywhere. Younger professionals from college will move up at a snails pace & professionals hired from outside the firm that have experience elsewhere are often ignored as well. The company lives and dies by the "people who stay" and that is how the hierarchy is set up in the company, from Directors to supervisors, it goes by who has been here the longest even if that individual is way under qualified. They will tell you all these things and promise you change when you voice your opinion and it goes absolutely nowhere, which again makes morale low and it incredibly hard to come to work in the morning.
Compensation & Benefits - The compensation is incredibly low compared to the rest of the open market, if you have between 5-10 years experience the company pays you pretty low compared to others . Now, you may get a nice bump in pay when you are hired, but don't worry the company gets that back from you with horrible raises. The raise structure in the company is down right insulting, if you get a 3% raise they act as if they did you a huge favor, the average raise is 1.5%-2.5% and it creates very low morale which affects quality of work.
Work/Life Balance - Work/life balance is great depending on who you are and how your work ethics are. If you are a hard work, focused on delivering how quality production and products to the client, you will absolutely suffer here. I have witnessed many hard working professionals get stepped on here, since this is an "Employee owned company" they love to push this thing they call "Professional time" which in their culture means "work for free and do not get paid either money on your paycheck or compensation time". Now the most of us have heard of "Professional Development time" which means to improve your professional knowledge, skills, competence & effectiveness usually done through training or advanced learning classes. So I am not sure where this "professional time" became work for free, you as the employee get nothing for it and the managers get richer. If you are a lazy procrastinator you will be able to work from home to do personal things on company time, take 2 hour lunches, come in at 9am and leave at 4pm, play videos and games on your computers, text or spend all day on social media, or dump off all of your work on hard workers. I saw those following items take place daily here and it was so bad that good workers were fleeing from the company for the simple fact that none of these people were held accountable for their actions, even when multiple engineering professionals brought it to managements attention, it was simply ignored and it kept going on, it will drive you to a point of anxiety.
Senior Management - From what I have seen the only thing Senior Managers seem to worry about is applied % rates and ESOP. Most managers in the office were approached several times whether it had been a schedule issue, a professional issue, a resource issue, a personnel issue or project managing issue, almost every time those employees got 0 resolution on the issues they tried to bring forward to their managers, they elevate it as your are taught and told to do and it still gets nowhere and is ignored. It is a sad thing to see, as there are good professionals in the office and this company they try to do the right thing, but the bad out weighs the good so it often goes nowhere. Not sure how the corporate Senior managers are as the regional office never deals with them much , so often employees don't get to voice their concerns to those managers in corporate.
Culture & Values - To be honest I am not sure I know how to answer this subject for my review and opinion. To me, it seemed it was a culture of total lack of accountability and CYA , lead engineers would dump all their work onto other mid level engineers and they would do nothing, but when something went wrong they were quick to throw people under the bus in meetings or on internal calls to protect themselves. Lots of in my opinion unprofessional behavior that ranges from Supervisors and employees shouting on their personal phones over personal matters (something you should not be doing at your job, it is unprofessional and childish), people who bring their personal matters to the office and use it as an excuse for not working or being rude to other employees , people leaving throughout the day to deal with their own personal matters I.E. getting tires on a car, checking on home renovation projects, watching their kids while saying they are working and not completing their assignments or working as a team to complete a project. I mentioned in my Pros that you can Work From Home which is a huge plus for times when it is needed, their are several supervisors and employees who work from home 2 times a week or more and are not truly working, they are not available and they just use excuses to work from home so they don't have to come to office I felt.
Additional comments - Yearly Performance reviews are absolutely pointless, the remarks that are written on them are childish and almost not even appropriate to put on a performance review. The performance review does not at all gauge an individuals knowledge or skills. There is also in my opinion no training or professional development here to build an engineers weaknesses and strengths. Very top heavy in some offices, lots of people who are near or over the age of retirement making large money to quite honestly do very little.
