Excellent Company, Some Instability
Pros
Great pay & benefits, first off; LHI hires the best and works hard to attract and retain them. I had a figure in mind to negotiate to when they hired me, and their offer beat it by roughly $10K, before I even started to negotiate. Same thing happened with someone I hired, beating her starting point by roughly the same amount. If they want you on board, they don't mess around with minutiae like your salary... Benefits, including medical, 401(k), and so forth, were top-notch, even though they were reportedly reduced from prior years due to the economy and rising costs; still pretty much the best I've had. Management is above average in most respects. As always, more communication is better, but they understand that generally. Annual employee reviews are strictly adhered to, and there was ample training in how to best do them and use them as a training tool, although follow-up with supervisors to confirm these were doing the reviews properly was a weak point. The review format is similar to Milgard Manufacturing's MPS, but less structured and rigorous. With that said, many companies don't even do reviews as promised, so LHI is well above the mean in that respect. The philosophy is that the contents and grades of a review shouldn't be a surprise Bottom line is that if they needed to expand my old department again and rehire, I would gladly go back to LHI.
Cons
Biggest issue there was constantly shifting lines and flows from senior management down to those of us on the front lines. There was also a schism between the Lehigh people and the Hanson people, beneath the surface. Lots of carving out of areas of control, fiefdom-building and the like, rather than jettisoning that nonsense and just working together as a company. There was a program named W.I.N. instituted to right-size and reorganize the company, in the light of going to a Central Service Center (CSC) environment. After repeated layoffs, staff and management referred to it as "Who Is Next?", e.g., who will be laid off next. Not very good for morale... When layoffs did come, there didn't appear to be rule or reason for why it was done. Long-time employees would disappear overnight, with no clue as to why, and their positions were either eliminated or re-hired, again with no explanation.