Too Many Empty High Fives, Not Enough Difficult Conversation
Pros
Guidant hires awesome, kind, funny, and caring individuals. These people make any day better and brighter. These people are the only reason you come into work--you can’t let them down. They provide great benefits and focus on work life balance for higher level employees. Flexibility for higher level employees is great. They do great events and parties and have lots of social presence--both in social media and with each other as an office. The marketing "team" is a small and highly effective group of people. They are responsible for a lot of press coverage for the company and that press coverage sells Guidant's product. The sales team is a bunch of great people who focus hard and get results while making each other laugh. The operations team works so hard its ridiculous particularly given the amount of obstacles they have to overcome just to get through the obscene deadlines set for them. Some of the managers are just fantastic at what they do and they stand up for their employees against all odds. The CEO and President are highly intelligent leaders who try hard to be accessible to the entire company (and very rarely succeed but not for lack of effort).
Cons
Guidant prides itself on being a culture of “difficult conversations,” but in my time there, I saw them consistently decline to have said conversations with their employees before making big decisions. The tactic is always to avoid confrontation. As a result, this company has a hard time working with assertive personalities and thusly they lose out on innovative agents of change. They prefer to promote meeker individuals that the leadership can “pull out of their shells.” They want to mold their employees, not utilize the strengths of existing personalities. To some this may be a wise management tactic, but to most it is stifling and promotes a general air of “needing to fit in” to succeed. Internally, the messaging to employees at Guidant is that the turnover rate is not high. While there is good and bad turnover, I did an informal count. While I was employed with them for 2 years, I calculated that I saw 21 of about 80 total employees exit. These exited individuals spanned all levels of employment from entry level to Executive and their reasons for exit varied (lay-offs, ends of contracts, no choice to renew, mutual decisions, fired based off of performance/behavior). To see an entire fourth of them leave—either by force or by choice—created a pretty deep sense of instability. The feeling that remains is one of not being allowed to make a mistake or speak your mind, for fear of being let go. While I was employed there, I felt that the company did little to combat this sensation, even though I often heard employees express a lack of confidence that they would come in the next day and have a job. There is a general sense from leadership that all those who have exited, “were wrong,” or, “will be happier somewhere else,” or, “made a simple mistake,” and that Guidant in no way contributed to those exits. A good employer has curiosity about exits, not excuses and explanations. This belief was so great they offered a "Zappos Deal" to anyone who felt they didn't fit in. The deal was an offer to give anyone who felt they didn't fit in two months worth of severance pay if they left by a certain date. To this day, I have no idea how many people took the offer. The Human Resources “Department” is highly unprofessional but has a lot of “great ideas.” The department is small and overwhelmed. It fails to keep up with internal demand for help and fails to recruit at an appropriate pace causing much undue stress on it’s existing employees to cover the gaps. The HR department is comprised of very young individuals who have little to no experience in the Human Resources Field. They make amateur mistakes and upper management continually rationalizes these mistakes without proper due diligence on them. Equal treatment of women in this office is an issue, despite a fairly gender balanced employee base. I cannot go into details on this because I fear it will reveal my identity. Enough said.