Pros
Good benefits and compensation. Great colleagues.
Kontras
- Employees are exhausted and demoralized after two years of no promotions, pay increases or new hires/backfills. The company has cited economic headwinds as justification, yet have managed to scrape together a few pennies for several acquisitions over that period. Leadership continues to pay lip service to valuing employees, but actions speak otherwise. Trust has completely evaporated after a period during which leadership built strong trust across the company through its excellent handling of COVID. - Leadership has diagnosed the current staff as being inefficient and unproductive. They have failed to draw any connection between productivity and morale or process inefficiency/bureaucracy. Instead, have decided that the best way to improve "revenue per employee" is to force everyone to return to working onsite, despite the annual company-wide internal survey results showing that remote/hybrid work is one of the few things people still like about working here, and seemingly having forgotten that STEMCELL announced a "commitment to flex" last year with no foreseeable changes to remote/hybrid work. - Accordingly, most staff now believe that the company's strategy for increasing revenue per employee focuses not on growing revenue, but instead on shrinking the number of employees by getting people to quit, which is cheaper than laying people off. - Leadership keeps telling us that the future vision is for us to be "the Amazon of biotech." No one can figure out whether this is supposed to be inspirational or threatening. Why would we model ourselves on a company with questionable business ethics, a singular focus on profits rather than values, and a reputation for indifference towards its employees? These are exactly opposite to the traits that have made STEMCELL a great company and a great employer for most of its history.