- On-site parking is very expensive (>$100 per month).
- Monthly pay if you are salaried.
- Loss of expected grants has resulted in recent layoffs.
- VERY strictly hierarchical management philosophy. Obviously not applicable across all groups within the organization, but the impression often given is that if you were qualified to question management's decisions or directives, you'd be management. Going to upper management with concerns can be employment suicide, especially if those concerns could have an impact on research by requiring funding or personnel to address. This is the biggest problem and leads to most of the others (directors and dept managers not feeling safe defending their departments/employees against unrealistic expectations, bench-level employees not taking and then losing vacation time because they feel their jobs are on the line, etc.).
- Administrative departments such as IT, lab services, and the admin pool are not respected within the organization and are often starved of resources including personnel and physical space. My department has people sharing computers to save on expenses, as an example. Multiple times, employees within my department have had registration for company-wide training seminars confirmed for weeks, then got told at the last minute their seat was needed by somebody else.
- Campaigns within the company to increase training, solicit feedback, and drive morale do not explicitly (or likely intentionally) exclude administrative groups, but they functionally do.
- Career paths are virtually non-existent. The CEO has even said in a town hall meeting that the expectation is that folks are here for a few years and then move on to other opportunities (again, reflecting the structural bias toward research positions--many of which are filled by graduate students and recent grads--while ignoring administrative departments).
- Annual raises put employees in direct competition with each other. As my supervisor explained to me, departments are given a budget assuming every employee receives an apx cost of living increase. In order for someone who excelled that year to receive an additional increase, that has to come out of someone else's paycheck.
- It's just best to avoid dealing with HR whenever possible. The left hand frequently has no clue what the right hand is doing, which is problematic when it comes to critical questions of benefits, policies, etc. HR is not the most trusted department within the organization.
- When there are outreach programs on how to improve things, employees typically have to put forward any concerns in a public way. For example, there was a program to plan the next 10 years of the Broad's growth that solicited feedback from employees about what can be improved about the company's culture; the online message board required you to sign in and made your name visible on the post for all to see. In recent meetings about how things could be improved within my department, while the facilitation was performed by someone outside the group, departmental senior management was sitting right there.
