Dow Chemical Reviews in Houston, TX Area

Pros

Plenty of opportunities for international growth

Cons

Experienced hires often get short changed

Pros

money, benefits, fringe benefits, community involvement

Cons

shift work, stress, teamwork needed

Advice to Senior Management

make a renewed commitment to the personnel on a lower level

Pros

-Competitive salary
-Great corperate strategy
-Work with some of the best and brightest in the industry
-Very open and communicative corperate culture. Great communication at all levels.
-Safety. Dow has one of the best safety programs in the industry with process safety pemployees involved in a wide range of international consortiums etc.

Cons

-Performance review methodology causes significant angst amongst employees. Forces people into a ranked system with capped quantities of employees allowed in each rank. Quite subjective and depending on how good of a leader you have, could result in questionable rankings.

Advice to Senior Management

Revamp the performance review methodology. It is universally disliked and not well understood by the significant majority of employees.

Pros

One of the best places I have ever worked. I cannot remember when I have been so happy to go to work for a company.

Cons

None I would not change anything about DOW

Advice to Senior Management

none

Pros

Well organized. Great people. Great training programs.

Cons

Lots of beauracracy type paperwork and red tape. But it comes with any big company. They don't pay the most and will tell you straight up.

Advice to Senior Management

Check salaries at other companies and match.

Pros

Work with many of the best in the industry. Dow Chemical has good reputation of excellence and people are usually willing to help out and collaborate on projects.

Cons

Compensation is of a chemical company ... does not compare to a petrochemical company like Exxon or Shell or Chevron. Freeport location not very pretty ... but that's true for any plant environment.

Advice to Senior Management

Take in feedback from employees on company decisions and communicate path forward better. Employees sometimes feel in the dark or like their opinions don't matter. This isnt all the time, just sometimes.

Pros

Commitment to EH&S is real and serious.
Communication of vision and goal alignment is reasonable.
Very strong technical bench and colleagues though Dow is doing it's best to throw this away.

Cons

Very Poor accountability for management.
Politics are beyond bad and on into ridiculous.
Work processes focus only on the process and not the work ensuring that the lowest common denominator is applied in an oppressive ineffective bureaucratic mess.
Inward focus is so bad it is laughable.

Advice to Senior Management

Dow has a large pool of highly talented people that are mostly wasted. If Dow could even get to the point of treating their people as assets rather than opportunities for cost cutting it would be truly transformational. Find a zealot to run the company who can break-up the mafia families of leader cliques who self promote themselves throughout the company; good luck as the rot is almost universal and ensconced to the very top of the Board.

Pros

- responsibility provided early
- many different jobs available
- challenging environment
- self-paced career advancement

Cons

-limited locations
- inbred business mentality
- difficult to move between/advance between businesses

Pros

Dow Chemical does offer a variety of job experiences, and good growth opportunities You are an asset to them, meaning they do not care about the happiness of their employees, or the work-life balance of their employees. Instead they care about the number of hours you can work, and how cheaply they can get you to work those hours.

Cons

Dow Chemical requires you to work ridiculously long hours with low compensation for the number of hours worked. They do not care about their employees happiness, or retaining employees for the long term. When I was looking to relocate to another state for personal reasons, they offered me a job with no relocation when competitors would pay relocation. Then they offered a cheap version of relocation, which again was not competitive with industry standards. I opted to leave the company, and seek employment elsewhere. Since then, I've realized how much better a company culture can be.

Advice to Senior Management

Learn to respect your employees and their contributions. Also, you should ensure company pay is competitive with the industry average and approximately fair for the job tasks.

Pros

People treat each other with respect.

Cons

There is often lack of accountability with middle managers, as they are moved around often and therefore cannot be accountable for any actions they take (and take any credit for short-term profits) during their tenure at any position. Lack of business strategy in some divisions.

Advice to Senior Management

Re-read "Good to Great" by Jim Collins - spend less time worrying about alignment at the division level, and worry more about getting good people who work together across functions to do great business.