Mostly Good - Low Pay Won't Match Market
Pros
Good work life balance, at least for me in IT. I know the Operations department is run to the bone. It's a big company with many new job opportunities within the Copeland ecosystem. Has not laid off anyone in my business unit in the five years I have been here. I know other business units at Copeland have. My manager always backed me up, had confidence in me, and allowed me to have 90% free range to solve problems how I saw fit. He also gives me 100% credit for all the work I do, and never steals or obfuscates who did what. If I make a mistake, the conversation is about corrective action, not punitive. Three days WFH is very nice. That said, since 99% of who I support lived in Mexico or the Philippines as you will see in my 'cons' section, it could be 100% WFH. I was always treated with respect by both other individual contributors as well as managers & executives. I have heard that screaming goes on at the executive level meetings, but I haven't experienced anything like this myself.
Cons
Being private equity owned, there is a constant change, and these are problematic from an IT prespective as we have shared service IT, and we can't fix our own IT problems ie firewall, DNS, etc. You have to hop on an EOC call and spend 12 hours with people in India / Philippines / Romania, explaining to them how to do their job to solve your problem. I don't think it's malicious, just incompetence and trying to create their own fiefdoms, but often corporate gets in the way. Very occasionally, these people get fired and this is a step in the right direction. There are mandated ratios of high cost / medium cost / low cost employees. For example, you will have 95% American managers, with one American report, a few Mexican reports, and a horde of people from Philippines / India / China. The cultural differences in American proactiveness and iniative are absent in other locations and it takes so much extra time trying to get these people to do what they should without explaining every detail, it would've saved cost to have all Americans that have a common cultural understanding. There are other business units that have been pulled apart and pushed together so many times they have no subject matter experts who know how their business or IT systems work. Also no documentation obviously. This is a huge gap and dealing with these unmature business units is extremely painful. The only thing keeping them afloat is they don't have competitors in their space. In the five years I have been here, I have had yearly raises of 0% (2020), 2.5%, 4.5%, 2.5%, and 4.5% would have been this year's. At the end of the day, the above were annoyances and did not contribute to me leaving. What made me leave is I felt they didn't value my contributions until it was too late and I had multiple better offers at a different companies. After applying to a few places, I got multiple significantly higher offers within 3 weeks. I think it was likely budgeting and forecasting that prevented their offer from being competitive. Either way, they're sending my old job to Mexico as they don't have the money to pay an American a fair and market competitive wage I assume.