Management - At Wilson Tool, you get to be a manager one of two ways. For lower level managers, you stay with the company for an obscene amount of time, in some cases 20 years or more. For upper level managers, you need to be related to the founder of the company, Ken Wilson, in some way. There are many managers at WT, most of them doing very little to add value to the company. I had no less than 3, and I was never sure who exactly I reported to. In some departments it was almost comical how many there were - for example in sales there was one guy who managed the whole North American sales force, and two others who did...? All these nepotism hires sucking down salaries and benefits meant that their wage costs were high, so good luck trying to get a raise! And the pay scale was absurdly slow - you can be fully performing in most roles in a year or less, but you'll wait 5 years to get to full pay. In general my managers were dull yes-men/women who just did what they were told, without questioning it, which is what you will be expected to do as well. A few were a bit brigther, but they were all engineers, so they were totally concerned with data and efficiency. Their attempts to manage the human side of the business were comical at best, even though they knew it was crucial to the success of the business. Moreover, my direct managers were highly unprofessional, bringing their religious beliefs to work and using that in addition to other factors to treat basically every employee differently. There were definitely "favorites" and "troublemakers," and god help you if you were in the latter group. Finally, managers are addicted to bad ideas. The only have bad ones, the ones you read about in management books as being proven ineffective over the last, oh, 5 decades. Yeah, those. But their philosophy is, if X didn't work, then we have to do X harder! Or we need to do X all the time instead of just part of the time! Or, it's the employees' fault: if only the believed in X like we do! Overall, the only redeeming quality of the managers here is that they could have actually been worse, and by that I mean they could have been some of the megalomanics you read about on the internet. Enough said.
Culture. In a word, the culture of the front office was TOXIC. The environment created by management encourages employees to throw one another under the bus, curry favor with managers, compete for clientele, and all sorts of other business no-nos. Toxic personalities are enshrined as "leaders" instead of being fired or put in their place with a write-up. Management even tolerates outright verbal abuse and harassment between employees, under the guise of "constructive feedback." Meanwhile, the managers think everyting is hunky-dory because they issue these surveys every year that everybody answers positively to. When I pointed out that the survey was not anonymous, since it comes directly to our work email with a unique link to the survey site, instead of being sent out to the whole department by the manager or somebody in HR, they acted like they just didn't understand. At any rate everyone just answers positively since they are so afraid of getting dragged into somebody's office and confronted, or even worse - fired - for being down on the company. In fact, they have a number of "sticks" to beat people with should they fall out of line. The company values, for example: if you're helping others out on a quote for a customer, you're being a Team Player. If you're critiquing another employee (who is a favorite of management, and you're not) then you're not being a team player, and you will be downgraded on your review for it. If you screw up, and you're one of the favorites, well, it's because you're working so hard on being Customer Focused. If you screw up and you're a troublemaker, it's because you didn't follow the Standard Work for your job/task. The list goes on... Sadly, HR is basically impotent to do anything about this; I was even told at one point when explaining some situation that I should just quit.
Expectations of you: You will be expected to show up and clock in on time, and do your job. You will be expected to smile from ear to ear the whole time, and say nothing negative about the company or your experience there. You can make suggestions about how to improve trivial processes, but nothing too ambitious, because your manager designed that process in the 90s and it's still fine! You will be treated like a child, and you will be fine with it. You will be micro-managed, and you should welcome every last suggestion, even if it means changing the way you do your job 20 times a week. You should not, under any circumstances, critique others, the company, or anyone in it, even constructively, because then you're being "negative" and can be disciplined. Do not complain, ever.
Bottom line: Avoid this place like the plague, ebola, North Korea, and all STDs combined. The job market is so good in MN right now, you have to be insane to take a job here. If you absolutely must, get a good therapist, a prescription for some anti-depressants and anti-anxiety meds, and prepare to have PTSD for a good year or two after you quit, which you will, unless you get sucked into the vortex and waste away at this place. If that happens, not only your career will die, but also your soul.