Grainger reviews

I've had the opportunity to work in several functional areas around the company over the 6+ years I've been there and although each department had its own culture, one thing remained the same...big corporate politics ruled. If you enjoy having meetings to discuss the next meeting, and progress moves slower than snails, then you may like it here. Nothing moves fast here and it's likely because middle management doesn't have a clue. (Managers up to Directors) I've never worked for an organization as siloed as Grainger. Getting anything done requires talking to 7 or more people. Management is consistently turning over - likely the reason why they don't know anything - and people are promoted based on popularity, not fully on performance. In Supply Chain, they've had at least 5 Directors in the last for years. Where's the continuity? It's hard to follow a vision when there isn't one. In Product Management, arrogance rules. Everyone keeps info to themselves in hopes of being the one to have the "grand idea." Look out for yourself there because your DPP won't support you. In Credit/Collections, putting unqualified people in manager roles is the true theme there. They don't understand the concept of "it's a good thing to communicate with your direct staff of supervisors and indirect reports." Overall, the senior leaders (VP level and above) seem to get it. It's their direct staff who can't carry out the basic needs of managing their functional areas. Grainger offers a lot of job opportunities, but be forewarned, these jobs are very typically focused on one or two functions and are not wholistic like you may expect from a smaller company.

This is long, but I hope you will take the time to read it in hopes of helping you avoid a mistake. Before starting, I was warned about the culture shift that was occurring recently but the compensation was incredible and the pitch given during my interviews seemed like things were going great. Let me start with the fact that there are a ton of great people who work for Grainger in Finance at the lower levels. They are smart and dedicated to doing a great job and almost all of my encounters with them were impressive. Unfortunately there is almost a complete disconnect between those lower level employees and the higher levels in Finance (everyone I worked for at Sr Dir and above). The culture pitched during the interviews was very different from that which I encountered when starting and it progressively got worse during my tenure there. Here are the issues I witnessed firsthand during my short time with the company: - A new layer of management at the VP level was added last year and has resulted in a power struggle, long hours for their employees and a complete culture shift. These dynamics were made worse with COVID-19 but even as that has become less worrisome, the culture continues to decline. - Mistakes are bound to happen to everyone, but when they did the question from leadership was "whose fault is it?". They wanted to be able to blame someone rather than try to figure out how to make things better next time. A lot of this seemed to be related to that power struggle above. - There are some individuals in upper management in Finance who document conversations to use against team members in the future, leading to employees looking over their shoulders. Oftentimes, the words from those conversations would be twisted to benefit that manager's agenda. - Performance plans are the default approach to "coaching" at Grainger. If there are any perceived performance issues, HR is involved and that individual is placed onto a PIP. I witnessed persistent attempts to place lower lever employees on performance plans that didn't deserve to be placed on one. DO NOT GO HERE if you are in finance, Never at any of my prior companies have I encountered such a broken culture. There are plenty of other companies nearby or in downtown Chicago that treat their employees better.