City Of Naperville reviews

3.4

59% would recommend to a friend

(37 total reviews)
avatar

Doug A. Krieger

67% approve of CEO

48% positive business outlook

City Of Naperville has an employee rating of 3.4 out of 5 stars, based on 37 company reviews on Glassdoor which indicates that most employees have a good working experience there. The City Of Naperville employee rating is in line with the average (within 1 standard deviation) for employers within the Government & Public Administration industry (3.6 stars).

Reviews by job title

37 reviews
1.0
Apr 23, 2012

A frustrating place with low morale

Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

The pension plan and amount of vacation time for people hired before June 2011 is pretty good. Co-workers treat you well. Bosses tend to work and communicate with you well which often enables you to work on projects you prefer to work on. Supervisors generally don't have a a "do it my way or the highway approach" (atleast none of the ones i had did) Very rarely have an issue with being able to take days off.

Cons

Benefits are scrapped regularly. The new pension plan for new hires is awful compared to the old one for employees hired before June 2011. Vacation/sick days for new employees hired after June 2011is significantly reduced Senior management, aka City Council & City Managers Office, does not recognize their top tier employees and makes no effort to pay their performing employees comparable salaries to market rate. Low pay. HR did a compensation study last year using an independent consultant and discovered employees in the Professional and Leadership salary ranges were on average underpaid from 5 -20% per position compared to market value. The City manager in conjunction with the City council reduced the ranges 3% across the board for all employees even though the the evaluation showed the exact opposite should be done. City Council/City Managers office is indirectly waging a war on employees attacking their standard of living with regular and frequent premium increases for medical/dental plans, cutting benefits, salary range reductions, and increasingly shifting costs onto the employees. Senior Management (City Council & City Managers office) have managed to turn a great place to work into an a terribly frustrating place in a short amount of time by making the employees the scapegoat for the bad financial decisions made by them in the past. The talented employees are frequently leaving (after getting trained for a few years on the City's tab) and receiving significantly higher pay at other enterprises to do similar responsibilities. As a result, the remaining employees at the city are generally the under performing waste that no one else wants to hire (there are a few quality employees still there, but in general most of the longstanding employees are there just to collect a paycheck, not work). Exisitng employees are constantly picking up the slack for the departed employees with no training on the additional responsibilities as positions stay open for 6 months or longer. This leads to ridiculously long work days and many unpaid overtime hours for salaried employees just to keep up with day to day work. Very low morale among employees. People are bitter and agitated due to current working climate. Hopefully this will pass as time goes on for the sake of the remaining staff at Naperville, but every year it seems to get worse.

2.0
Jun 30, 2011
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Decent pension if you maintain employment for 20 years or more. Coworkers are generally very respectful and are willing to work with you. Good place to learn on the job as the electric utility is always on the cutting edge of technology.

Cons

management and city council has taken an anti-employee stance on all issues relating to employee compensation and benefits. They have made it well known during council meetings and workshops that the employees are not taken into consideration when making big decisions. Some of the council members comments during recent council meetings prove they have no idea how to run a utility that depends on having a qualified technical staff (hiring anyone cheap because of the economys current state is a disastrous way to run a electric utility) Benefits are being slashed regularly. Compensation is well below industry standards especially in the electric department. As a result the talented employees are routinely being poached by competitors like GE and other municipalities like City of St. Charles and Batavia. In the past year and a half there has been a massive turnover of the best engineers leaving voluntarily to competitors as Naperville's new policies have angered the entire staff. Employee turnover has led to no defined roles as the remaining staff is constantly picking up the slack for a departed employee from a totally different area of expertise (employee is often not trained on new duties, again hard to do with engineers as they take several years to be trained properly). Morale is the worst i have seen in my many years working for several different companies in different industries. Very few growth opportunities, the most qualified person is not always the one promoted. Stagnant salaries, one 2% raise in three years for employees who are rated well during evaluations is an obscenely bad policy for retaining a qualified technical staff. As a result employees are joining the city and leaving for the next best offer. All training budgets have been cut so employees do not have the opportunities to advance their skill set. Job security is no longer a guarantee as layoffs in recent years have rattled even the most secure and tenured staff members.

1.0
Jan 26, 2023

Horrible Place to work

Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

There are no pros to this job at all.

Cons

They will lie to you when they hire you: 1. "Yes you will have opportunities for overtime" TRUTH - absolutely not 2. "You earn vacation time from the moment you start" TRUTH - first you have to fill some mysterious bank before you can use any vacation time. 3. "There is a lot of training" TRUTH - there is none. Start work and if you get stuck ask someone. No training at all. Previous reviews have mentioned the social clicks, they are very real and very strong. Unless you are a legacy work somewhere else! Only legacies get the better opportunities, they are very, very favored. Supervisors have absolutely no managerial education or experience. The current supervisor's work experience is cutting hair in her basement. Please, please work somewhere else for your own mental health!!

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Glassdoor has 45 City Of Naperville reviews submitted anonymously by City Of Naperville employees. Read employee reviews and ratings on Glassdoor to decide if City Of Naperville is right for you.