Great Place to Work: Autonomy, Innovation, Responsive to Feedback
Pros
I work in IT Operations. Having worked in multiple organizations in the past, I can say that WWT's IT Operations is a cut above others for several reasons: autonomy, innovation, responsive to feedback. Autonomy: Technical teams have a great deal of latitude to determine how to get their jobs done. True, you cannot just do whatever you want to do at any time (even the CEO can't do that), but managers are constantly asking for suggestions and preferences from the team. You are encouraged to find new ways of doing things and to make existing procedures better. In this respect, WWT is like a start-up -- go forth and do. Innovation: In my mind, autonomy is closely related to innovation because autonomous people will feel emboldened to try new things. IT has monthly "Innovation Days", where managers encourage everyone to do something that they don’t normally do on a daily basis. Form teams with people that you don’t normally work with. Brainstorm. Build something cool. IT recently hosted a Hack-a-Thon, a multi-day event where self-formed teams were given time and money to innovate. How many other companies invest so much time into innovation in an IT Operations department? Responsive to Feedback: WWT Culture emphasizes receiving and responding positively to all feedback. Management up and down the entire organization is constantly sending surveys to seek feedback on what we like and what we don’t like. In fact, it gets tiresome how many times we are asked. Nevertheless, this is a good problem to have. Everyone does their best every day, and everyone wants to improve.
Cons
The building is a little old, and temperature control is pretty poor. However, we'll be moving into new facilities in a few months, so this concern should go away.
