Highly Toxic, High Turnover, High Burnout
Pros
The company has a noble mission statement. They make a product you can be proud of. Getting a day or afternoon off for personal reasons is usually not a problem and sometimes doesn’t require vacation usage.
Cons
When I was interviewing for this job Grande strongly emphasized work life balance and family values. In fact HR gave a compensation presentation to our entire department and explicitly told everyone that work life balance was considered a benefit which offsets the slightly lower than market pay they provided. The truth was very different. Once my probationary period was over and I got my ASE pin my hours changed from mostly first shift with some nights/weekends to a mix of third shift and first. I’ve worked third shift, and been in management positions that required being on call or present during multiple shifts. However, these hours were the worst I’ve ever been required to work. A normal week included overnights, late night/early morning starts after leaving the office at 5, as well as all the normal meetings and office tasks from 8-5. My life was work, eat, sleep an hour or two, and back to work. It would have been manageable except there was still a requirement to make my regular 1st shift meetings and duties in the office too. It became common for Friday to arrive with less than 8 hours sleep since Monday. Weekends became solely for recovery from the work week. Vacation was there for recuperation after each successive burn out. My work life balance vanished and did not return until I left the company. The social atmosphere is one of forced positivity and poisonous disingenuous relationships. This is the only company I started with where people came up to me in my first few weeks to tell me who I should and shouldn’t associate with if I want to succeed. There’s interdepartmental fighting that takes the form of gossip, sabotage, and false reporting on projects. The upper management has no tolerance for negative reports so when a project gets off schedule or has serious problems it becomes a game of CYA until the problems can no longer be hidden. With the interdepartmental fighting and subterfuge and executive insistence that everything must be positive (choose happiness) projects were routinely double or triple the planned budget and years overdue. As a result Grande’s project portfolio is full of stalled projects that failed for no reason other than the toxic company culture. Turnover among the production crew is very high. There was a cadre of senior cheesemakers and operators who had been with Grande for decades, but new people came and left very rapidly. In the small towns where Grande has their plants they began to get a reputation as a burn out job that is good in a pinch, but not a place to stay. Management was just as bad. When a major project failed often somebody got the axe. I saw engineers and directors with 20+ years let go without warning. Mid-level management lived in a culture of fear were everyone was just trying to stay alive. This only increased the distrust and political fighting of team against team, department against department. I left Grande after I recognized my health, my family, and mental wellbeing had changed drastically for the worse over the 5 years I was there. Many others started leaving too. The good ones ran for the door. The shysters and players, who either enjoyed the highschool like clique’s dirty politics or simply never had the ethical integrity to care whether they had to play dirty to succeed, stayed behind. The Peter Principle managers who knew that if they left they’d probably not get another comparable position also stayed. It’s a truly toxic environment.