Evonik Degussa Reviews

Pros

Great health benifits
Decent pay
People are friendly

Cons

Support of talent
No menotring, except throught an international program

Advice to Senior Management

Support of new talent
Advise a path for new employees
Help them gain exposure to diffrent aspects of the business

Pros

good salary, good health benefits,

Cons

youre just a number in the company

Pros

structured, generous in many sense. Career opportunities are great. They do help you find a job or stay with the company when the position is terminated.

Cons

not a flat organization. a little politic as well. Part of the German culture, people are affraid of making mistakes.

Advice to Senior Management

make it more international. Not only in being diverse employement, but also having non German culture. Too many Germans in the managing position /damaging international company image

Pros

Nice people who were willing to teach and help me
Interesting processes

Cons

No cafeteria
Lots of out of date / inaccurate documents

Pros

Some very interesting chemistry.
Good technical service equipment - especially in Germany
The "rank and file" employees are a good group of people. In part due to the shared experience of working in an environment with a poor upper management.
Also, by and large working with the employees in Germany was enjoyable.

Salary and benefits are competitive. Not exceptional, but competitive.

[Neither Pro, nor Con]: It is important to understand that the Hopewell based businesses are essentially independent of Evonik Degussa NAFTA which is headquartered out of New Jersey. At an operating level, reporting, sourcing, etc. all goes back to the Goldschmidt business unit in Essen, Germany. To this extent, these comments should be interpreted only as applying to the Hopewell VA unit.

Cons

A highly politicized atmosphere driven by upper management in Essen and by the top eschelon of managers in Hopewell.

Top management in Hopewell is largely comprised of ex-Whitco people. The attitude and behaviors may simply be the naturual result of a poorly executed acquision in which the only survivors were those who subordinated everything to their career. Whether yes or no, this is a back-stabbing environment where blame is passed sideways and down. Yes, this sounds simply like sour grapes....

...on a tangible level:

I chose to leave when I learned that my budget was only about 25% of what I had been told prior to accepting the job. A porttion of the money was actually "in" my budget but was being spent in other areas as a way to limit visibility in Germany. I was also asked to play minor accounting tricks by pushing product on customers, knowing that it would be returned. Nothing illegal...but you put it all together and you realize that this might not be a good place to settle down.

As in the other post, there is a definite difference in opportunity between the German expatriates and the "local" employees.

This is a German company and it is driven by the needs of the German operations. For example, efforts are made to maintain as much production in Essen as possible to maintain favorable capacity utilization & cost numbers...even where more cost effective production & capacity is available in the US to serve US customers. Senior German executives are measured in part by their ability to support the Essen operations. In their defense, German employment laws do create high opportunity costs. Unfortunately U.S. performance measurements don't account for these demands. Don't count on the bonus component of compensation

Finally, the statistics: There were 3 market manager positions in my group: these positions were held by 9 people in the 3 years from 2005-2007...only one moved to another position in the company & none were asked to leave. People voted with their feet.

Its an unfortunate story: This is a company with good technology, competitve assets, good global infrastructure, and some very interesting market strategies (if they could be deployed) - it is being torn apart by the after effects of Evonik/Degussa's long string of acquisitions and continuing difficulty in making the evolution from between being a German company to a Multi-national company with headquarters in Germany.

If you already live in Richmond VA and need a job, well, so be it, staying at home is worth a lot. If you don't, I am not sure that this is the right company to justify relocating.

Advice to Senior Management

The matrix structure is broken. Get rid of the regional management. Let the business units report directly into the Global Business Managers in Essen. The plant and administration can be managed by a plant manager.

Listen to the exit interviews. Many people in Essen told me that they were aware of the management problems & particular managers who were a problem.

Pros

[Comments in relationship to Goldschmidt Chemical] German organization has depth and technical competence.

Cons

Degussa (Parsippany) has a strong management staff. The Goldschmidt unit (Hopewell VA) is very poor and suffers from an incomplete assimilation by Evonik/Degussa. Goldschmidt operations in the Americas and Europe operation independently from Degussa. A double-standard exists for north american employees - advancement is reserved for German expatriates. Americans have little/no advancement opportunity. Most decisions are structured to benefit the business units in Germany - for example, transfer pricing and local pricing is set to manage german production unit's profitability. This is o.k., except that American managers remain responsible for local profitability without having authority.

Advice to Senior Management

1.) Need to invest effort into managing matrix conflict (Business Units v. Geographic Mgt.); 2.) Better align accountability and authority; 3.) Need to better integrate the Evonik businesses: a career path needs to be available across business units, locations and nations.