Kleinfelder reviews

Kleinfelder was well known for its commitment to its employees. It was a respected geotechnical and environmental engineering firm with a strong presence in the Western US and long-term relationships with local clients. The company ambitiously expanded operations nationwide through growth and acquisition, with reasonable success. The company could boast of its remarkably low turnover rate and the longevity of its employees. Many, many individuals had been with the firm for ten, twenty, even thirty years. I knew several people who had never worked for another firm. These are the reasons I joined Kleinfelder. Notice that all the verbs are in the past tense. Around 2008, the company changed its leadership and its strategic direction. The company's stated goal became to multiply revenue by a factor of five, to a billion dollars a year. This was to be accomplished within five years by morphing into an engineering design firm, and would be implemented by re-branding, strategic hires, reorganization, organic growth, aggressive acquisition, entry into unfamiliar markets, and new relationships with clients that represented potential multimillion dollar annual revenues. Kleinfelder made the conscious decision to forego the opportunities in the local markets that had been its bread and butter, in preference for huge national and international customers. There was no safety net, no Plan B. In fairness, the company succeeded in winning an impressive number of contracts with very large clients. However, the revenues represented by these wins did not offset the loss of revenue from the company's customary work in local markets. Backlog disappeared and the layoffs commenced. Too late, the company realized that transition from a well-respected firm that was "local everywhere" to a nationally-recognized design firm didn't work out as expected. Management decided to pour large amounts of capital into local marketing efforts to recapture clients who had been neglected for the preceding five years. It didn't work very well. The core of the company is gone. Employees who had been with the firm for twenty years and more were fired or allowed to leave (or encouraged to leave). Good customers were lost. What's left is a "me too" design firm with world-wide aspirations and no name recognition, that is led by management that has never accomplished anything remotely like the firm's stated goals, and doesn't know how. Despite assertions to the contrary, employees are no longer valued. Loyalty is no longer valued. Only shareholder equity matters, although the organization is curiously inefficient. While the company boasts of a "flat structure", the fact is that this company of 1800 employees has not only a CEO, a COO, and a CFO, but also a chief technical officer (CTO), a chief information officer (CIO), a chief counsel, and dozens of vice presidents and direct owners. To support all this management bloat, utilization goals of 95 percent are the norm. Management spins the condition of the firm as a result of a bad economy, and that the firm's competitors are operating the same way, with similar results. It's unclear whether management actually believes this, but the rank-and-file certainly don't. The various personality flaws of individual managers won't be discussed, but one anecdote will illustrate the cultural issues at the top of the organization. One manager, during the keynote address at a company-wide technical gathering (attended by nearly 1000 employees), displayed incredible insensitivity when he likened the company's new strategic vision to the Spaniards' conquest of the New World. He stated that the Conquistadors' success could be attributed to Cortez' decision to "burn the boats", which was intended to signify that there would be no going back to Kleinfelder's old business model. I could only imagine what employees of Native American heritage felt at that moment. Unbelievably, the same manager reprised the "burn the boats" comment at the same gathering one year later. Kleinfelder was once a wonderful place to work in a genuine family atmosphere. Now it is just another engineering company that wishes to be a juggernaut, but bears more resemblance to the Titanic.

About 3 years ago there was a decision to remake Kleinfelder into a design firm. Almost none of senior managment had ever worked at at a good design firm. Progress to that goal is very slow, and company growth has really only been by buying other companies, while the core company experiences layoffs. There has been a major exodus of many of the most talented people, particularly in the senior ranks of the firm, a number of whom have been there 20 years or more. Everytime a key person leaves most of what we hear is why it is good they are gone, not anything about the reasons they left and how there may be something to pay attention to and changes to be made. The core of the firm has been basically left to molder and the result is the firm is no longer people oriented like it used to be. What was a great people-oriented culture going back to the 1960s has been pretty much destroyed in just a few years. Employees are treated like lines on a spread sheet, nothing more, certainly not like professionals. Pay and benefits are quite poor. Senior managment will even admit this off the record, but are doing essentially nothing about it. The CEO just continually gives out the excuse about how the economy is just not that strong, but other firms are doing very well and their stock prices are shooting up. When it comes to medical benefits, which continually erode adn get more expensive, they keep blaming Obamacare. There is no 401(k) match and the ESOP, so called profit sharing plan, pays at best a paltry sum to emplyees accounts when it pays at all. When I left my compensation went up in every way at a different firm. Basically what this company needs desparately is a change in senior managment, before the company value drops any more, like the massive drop a year ago. The CEO turned the reins of the company over to the COO and seems to like running around giving speeches outside the company. I really think he is over his head, or just too lazy to do what he should and actually pay attention to running and growing the company. The COO has made the company very bureaucratic and sticking to processes are more important than actually doing the work. Everything has to be tracked and put in the right category or bucket. Employees are no longer treated respectively. Senior managment do not listen to ideas from employees, when what they are doing so obviously does not work, as evidenced by the significant drop in stock value. The Board of Directors is stacked by the COO and CEO so they won't do anything to change things either. It is really too bad to see such a good company sink down, but I guess it is not the first to do so.