Great People, lousy communication by upper management
Pros
The Company has some great clever and cooperative people, the atmosphere within the departments is usually very good and the people are (still) very motivated. Support of the middle management obviously depends on the actual Manager, yet is typically also good. It used to be a great Company with great culture - customer oriented and always keen to get the best results with the best Technology. People used to be proud to work for the company yet this is changing - its just another job nowadays.
Cons
Currently a lot of pressure on middle management ot reduce costs and workforce. Several very poor GM decisions in the last few years are now putting pressure on operating margin and have to be fixed immediately. GM is unable to make decisions and processes take (felt) forever. Since a year there is no decision whether to continue, discontinue or to replace a vital business IT system with another one...something which is vital for the business planning and even the usage of the existing one is not properly enforced by GM, every local office does its own thing and justifies it with different processes and systems in the different divisions. There is no general guidance at all for the corporations creating lots of friction losses and frustration. Bonus plans are completely intransparent and subject to random cutting as it occured recently. This is completely inacceptable when the bonus plan should serve as an incentive. It has been operated as a way to push up low regular wages to an acceptable level while keeping the option to shorten it later and not being forced to include this into regular salary increases. This is currently to be changed, but the way the targets are defined is to a vast extent still a joke. Career Progress is at random only. You have to be at the right place at the right time or you have to force it by yourself. HR sees ist role as a Gatekeeper to prevent careers as this might cause for requests for salary increases - which doesn't really take place even in case of promotion.
