Gerdau is the portrait of senior managerial bloat. What started as a nuisance has reached the point where it's made life a living hell for the salaried employees in the mills. Between Tampa, FL and Brazil, they have multiple layers of senior management with little to do. Therefore, there is an endless stream of foolish corporate initiatives and programs that do little but justify some manager's existence. These programs typically have nothing to do with improving safety or the steel making process, but instead consist of some MBA's idea of taking something simple and complicating to the point of absurdity. For example, it will take you 8-16 hours to create your personnel evaluation and you and most of your coworkers won't understand the majority of the criteria on it. No corporate fad is to obsolete or obscure for Gerdau and each initiative has its own acronym, expensive software package and time consuming set of tasks.
The salaried employees in the mills are responsible for implementing and maintaining all of these programs on top of whatever it was that they used to do. Therefore, supervisors (or Routine Facilitators, in Gerdau-speak) may only see their direct reports 20 minutes a day--the rest of their day is spent worrying about foolish tasks like "increasing employee engagement" or updating numerous storyboards. It is so ridiculous, that they actually inspect people's desks and make them have labeled, designated areas for their staplers and phones. Then, and I'm not making this up, they take before/after pictures of the desks and post them on bulletin boards to show how "successful" Gerdau management is.
The result of having MBAs run amok is that the wastefulness at Gerdau is astonishing. Departments that were previously run by 5 managers are now run by 10-15 salaried workers, most of which do nothing to affect the steel making process whatsoever. Another problem is that Gerdau is an Idiot Concentrator: most of the talented managers and engineers leave, while the lazy and inept remain. If you're talented, I strongly urge you to look elsewhere. If you're a screwup, welcome home.
