IDEXX Laboratories reviews

Morale is low within the department. Goals at times can be unatainable. Territory specific goals are not in place. Depending on your territory, you can really struggle and have alot of stress.

IDEXX prides itself on the fact it seeks to create long term value for employees. In fact, they even put it in the mission statement. There are huge banners in the building everywhere talking about empowering employees. If only that were true. IDEXX is designed much like a caste system. Directors, VPs and above sit in beautiful offices while the rest of the staff are in cubicles. And the building is kept at 76 degrees during the summer. That means a lot of people, in a confined space, sweating as they try to build the empire. And just when you thought this was bad, the company is seeking to tear down the cubicle walls and cram more employees into smaller spaces via their "collaborative work environments". This means your 8ft. by 8ft. cubicle is now about 3ft. by 5ft. and includes no walls, just a desk in a giant open space with a bunch of other desks. Many large companies are heading in this direction for a whole host of reasons, but they do something different. What do companies like Sun Microsystems, Microsoft and Intel have in common with their "collaborative work spaces"? EVERYONE sits in them from top brass to entry level worker. Not at IDEXX, it's very apparent who's important and who's not in the building. The compensation and benefits at IDEXX have also gotten much worse since 2008-2009. While many employees might not yet realize it, the new health insurance plan has essentially been gutted as IDEXX moved to a low cost provider. The company worked closely with the new provider to arrange a number of mailings and propaganda talking about how great its going to be, but thats far from reality. Many employees (myself included) now have to sit in our Doctors office on the phone, fighting with the new health insurance provider to pay for prescriptions and tests that we've had run and covered with the previous provider. The new look of IDEXX benefits package is cheap, cheap and cheap. That includes smaller increases and bonuses, despite consistent growth that's above industry average (even in this economy.) IDEXX has also recently chosen to implement a new strategy where they are eliminating tons of job descriptions in favor of "job families." This means titles are essentially very generic and quite often do not reflect anything you actually do, just the organizational structure you report to (e.g. Operations Specialist I/II/III, Customer Support Consultant I/II/III, Shared Services Manager or Financial Generalist I/II/III.) Although these might seem like valid titles on the surface, many of these people are in more mid-level positions and don't even work in finance or even speak to customers. They just happen to report through that particular area. This change means making life very difficult on employees trying to leave IDEXX. Your title is no longer, relevant, professional and personal. It's generic and usually sounds like much "less" of a position that your actual function. They fiercely defend this by encouraging employees to just ignore the new titles and keep calling yourself by your functional title. This was even recently posted on the internal, intranet, website. The problem with this (as we all know) when you seek a job elsewhere, background checks confirm your exact title, not what you think you did while employed.