Once a Beautiful Fun People-First Company
Pros
Peerless Mfg used to be a lovely company that cared for its employees. We used to have company get togethers, lunches and Christmas parties. The corporate office even had holiday events at work! Flex hours used to be the norm, and a happy environment was prevalent. That was 1 yr ago. After upper management made several terrible business deals that cost the company millions of dollars, it almost went bankrupt and ended up selling its heat-exchanger line to compensate. When that wasnt enough, they decided to merge with a business-saavy corporation called CECO, who they thought would save them (they saved the business from bankruptcy, but destroyed the Peerless family).
Cons
While CECO brought cash to save Peerless, they also brought with them a new kind of corporate mentality. Gone is the company-is-family mentality. They have driven Peerless to improve profits while sacrificing employee morale. Morale is terribly low now. Upper management is only concerned with profit, and so they overburden and overwork employees now like crazy. Its disheartening to see when very good, dedicated people are so overwhelmed to practically their breaking points and yet upper management only cares about money. Most employees have to work overtime (not paid for salaried people) and sometimes even weekends to try to catch up. Even so, the engineers are so inexperienced and under-trained that they make so many mistakes and jobs regularly have issues with them. Its easy to tell an engineer to stay focused on a job to get it done right the first time; but with so many jobs and so much work load, how can anyone stay focused on just one? You end up bouncing from job to job just to get the work load resolved. And management just does not care; the employees are constantly being put down, bullied or worse. They feel the constant crack of a bullwhip as they are pushed to release jobs. Theres no positive motivation for the employees to care about the work and to really devote themselves to improving. Between the low morale and the high workload, and constant push to release to fabrication, the "team" has surpassed their breaking point and yet, upper management still does not see that they need to help their employees. Their view is: if you cant survive, then maybe you should look for work elsewhere. Thats a terrible mentality - one of which most people dont have the option to do.
