WestRock reviews

Terrible upper management. If you aren't in the "in crowd" you will not get a promotion. There are people that stay in the same position for over 3 years like myself and management strings them along saying that they have their best interest. This is a bold face lie. Department moral is always low and turn over at this company is very high. You don't get paid for the amount of work you do as well. If someone gets fired or leaves the company they'll dump all the work on the work on you and expect you to do magic to keep up with the work load. Do yourself a favor and run. I would not recommend this company to anyone.

Shareholder value is the overwhelming focus at the company, which means that employee incentives, particularly raises, take a backseat to earning money for the board and the shareholders. While this is not unusual at many businesses, the eventual result is that there is very little incentive for most employees to work harder, learn new things, take on new responsibilities, etc. The pay is not exceptional, from what I understand it is moderate to low. We do get yearly raises, but generally the average is probably around 2.5%. Don't think you can lowball offer your way into the company and then get a significantly better salary after you've proven yourself. Despite expanding my position's responsibilities significantly, adjusted for inflation, I only make slightly more than the day I was hired. As far as I can tell there is no way around this wall, people say that the low raises are HR policy that is independent of employee achievement. This, coupled with the long tenure of many older employees, means that it is hard to advance and easy to stagnate there. You may have a pleasant work life and a good boss, but you'll never get promoted or get a raise unless someone just decides to quit (which rarely happens because of the pension) gets fired (which also rarely happens) or retires. The health benefits packaging started off fairly standard but it gets worse every year. As it stands now there is only one plan choice with a deductible of several thousand dollars that has to be paid yearly before anything else is covered (apart from preventative physicals and such). Great if you shatter your femur, not so much if you have bronchitis or sprain your ankle. The company does offer an HSA that they'll contribute to as a way to help offset the cost of the deductible, so that does help a little. The retirement plan has a good match (it actually increased a point after the merger) but they've changed where it is held three times in the last five years, which means you don't always have a lot of choice of the funds you'd like to put into your retirement account. Compared with companies that my peers work for, WestRock's benefits and vacation time are quite low. 2 weeks vacation only for the first 5 years, then 3 weeks years 5-12, 4 weeks 12-18, etc. When I was first hired the 20 days of vacation mark was at year 10, but recently they have been quietly moving it up a few years, presumably as a cost cutting measure in the hopes that people will leave before they reach that point. It's a little disheartening, I think if you've been with a company a decade you should get (and need) more vacation time than that. The company offers no maternity leave, no on site gym, no daycare. The feeling I get is that the company is still very much in the old school mode of "shouldn't your wife be handling that?" when it comes to child care. The company conducts random drug tests at all levels, not only for a prescreen, but at any time. They appear to be ramping this up lately.