Sakata Seed Reviews

3.6

74% would recommend to a friend

(24 total reviews)

Hiroshi Sakata

93% approve of CEO

80% positive business outlook

Sakata Seed has an employee rating of 3.6 out of 5 stars, based on 24 company reviews on Glassdoor which indicates that most employees have a good working experience there. The Sakata Seed employee rating is in line with the average (within 1 standard deviation) for employers within the Agriculture industry (3.7 stars).

Reviews by job title

24 reviews
2.0
13 Sept 2015

Glad to be gone!

Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Company pickup and cell phone. Also winter down time can be nice. Some great people who work here.

Cons

Poor management, low pay, get treated poorly by those in charge, insanely long hours and expected to work 7days a week and not have a life outside of work. Management does not train or help new employees and blames everyone else when things go wrong. Do not believe anything management tells you, and document everything to cover yourself.

2.0
26 Aug 2015
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Easy commute to work in the Skagit Valley outside Burlington, WA. Satisfaction knowing your work is providing quality vegetable seed to seed companies, growers, farmers providing food for people to eat. A few great people with great knowledge and personality work here, and are a pleasure to learn from and work with. A place that was once great, and still has potential for the future.

Cons

Massive wastefulness of time and resources. Poor scheduling and vastly under-qualified leadership who lack skills and job efficiency at most levels in many departments. Promised opportunities for promotion are not made available and secretly given to unqualified individuals whose families are friends with those in management, as favors. No attention to fully training full time or seasonal help, resulting in throwing bodies at tasks that require knowledge. When those individuals quit, the surviving workers have to pick up the slack for 3 positions worth of work, leading to working 7 days a week 10-12+ hours a day for very low pay by industry standards. This schedule is maintained for 6 months, with most of the rest of year similar. People get ill and are expected to work regardless, temp workers will be fired summarily in these situations. Leadership in under-payed as well, and completely unmotivated. Don't expect to see your boss for days or even weeks at a time as they are in hiding behind desks or telecommuting, frequently on vacation during the busiest times of year. Processes, tasks and paperwork are legion and management is not proactively involved, only showing their faces when a huge problem that could reflect on them and their career arises due to their personal and organizational neglect. Paperwork grows every few months to the degree that it crowds out getting the actual work done and leading to longer hours more months of the year. Suddenly, one full task involving two units of production leads to 50+ pieces of paperwork, each of which must be signed in multiple places by specific people who do not have time to in-depth check each process, yet are required to, and are held responsible for any problems. Along with other companies long-established in the seed industry, Sakata Seed is seemingly rushing headlong into a death spiral of declining productivity and employee retention that may destroy profitability unless the organizational decay is checked rapidly. Sadly, a very sick unethical work culture whose leadership is cannibalizing what was once a great company and place to work producing meaningful products.

1.0
1 July 2012

Headed Downhill

Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

None to write about. The good employees come and go fast and the ones who should go stay for ever. There is no sense of team with Sakata.

Cons

There are to many to list with what is wrong with Sakata. There are no leaders in command and the people in charge need to be moved out or let go due to horrible management "skills".

Viewing 1 - 3 of 24 Reviews

Glassdoor has 25 Sakata Seed reviews submitted anonymously by Sakata Seed employees. Read employee reviews and ratings on Glassdoor to decide if Sakata Seed is right for you.