Xcel Energy will forever stand out to me as a traditional top-down, shareholder/executive, suit held company with its bottom line always being it's ROI—not the environment, customers, or our communities as they'd like to have you believe via their public facade. As others have mentioned, the corporate culture here is hostile, negative and incredibly stale; This has been a known issue internally for a while now as the company itself was undergoing a corporate "culture change initiative" during my time there.
There's a huge problem with nepotism and hierarchies embedded within the company. To be promoted and to retain your position once you're hired you need to appease and align yourself with the ‘right people’ even if they're completely inept or unlikable. Promotions aren't frequent, and there is limited advancement as most positions are reserved for someone's relative or friend regardless of their abilities, skills or educational background. Because of this, some people get by doing less than others with the same title/position/compensation while others are forced to do all the work out of fear of losing their job. There's absolutely no correlation between compensation and workload/responsibilities.
- Slow and bureaucratic through and through. Adapting very poorly to millennials work environment.
- Disingenuous leadership. Senior leaders give the pretense of cooperation but are generally unwilling to work together.
- Management is there solely for the advancement of their own careers. They are egomaniacs and couldn’t care less about lower level representative, assistant, or associate employees. Most spent their workdays in pointless meetings in private offices trying to politically outmaneuver one another to capture as much corporate real estate as they could.
- Teams/Departments are competitive rather than collaborative. There is very poor cross-departmental communication and little respect for each department's role. Contractors are viewed and treated as being inferior to full-time employees and are not given benefits, sick days, or holidays off.
- Speaking of sick days, Xcel offers its full-time employees a horrible high deductible healthcare coverage through Medica with prescriptions through Express Scripts. You better be saving in your HSA because you’ll need it.
- IT and the Business Systems department is 5-10 years behind the times. Computers and internal networks are incredibly slow. Business processes don't make any sense. The company headquarters didn't even have employee Wi-Fi until the relocation to the new HQ in 2016, something standard pretty much everywhere else almost a decade ago.
