Ford Motor Reviews in Detroit, MI Area

Pros

Good compensation, relaxed atomsphere, and no accountability

Cons

Lack of accountability, ownership and beuracratic.

Advice to Senior Management

Lead by example.

Pros

Terrific cars. Strong sense of pride in the company.

Cons

Hierarchical. Average work life balance.

Pros

Ford provides excellent benefits and reasonable compensation. It also provides a structured training and rotation program that can be good for recent college graduates.

Cons

Ford management operates in functional silos. If you are hired into the finance staff, you will be limited to working on finance tasks - don't expect anyone to welcome your ideas on strategy, information systems, marketing, etc. For an MBA with more than a decade of management consulting experience, I found this very limiting.

Ford is also extremely political. Personnel decisions are made by committee, and can be be based on politics more than accomplishments. You may have contributed outstanding accomplishments to the firm, but if your boss is not willing to actively support you in front of his personnel committee then you will go nowhere!

The backbiting finally go to me. With ongoing staff reductions, managers were short on staff and I actually had my new employee stolen from me (personnel committee head usurped her, and I did not find out until she failed to show on her planned first day of work!). After working egregious overtime hours and cancelling my planned vacation days because of the workload, when things slowed down I requested some of my backlogged vacation time. I was astonished when instead of thanking me for delaying my vacation my boss tried to cancel it completely.

Advice to Senior Management

If you are going to hire experienced managers, please make use of their experience.

You should also rethink your policy of hiring almost all new hires from top MBA programs. You end up with a lot of disenchanted MBA's who are not being given the opportunity to use their skills. Instead you should hire a mix of BA/BS's and MBA's, so that the talent pool better matches the opportunities available for them.

Many of your long-time executives seem stuck in a time warp where Ford can do no wrong. You need to work on fostering a more entrepreneurial environment with management open to change and new ideas.

Pros

Good boss, GREAT products, Awesome CEO

Cons

No training budget, constant spending freezes (except for upper management travel)

Pros

work life balance, relaxed work culture

Cons

no career growth because Ford doesn't grow in USA

Advice to Senior Management

Care about employee's growth

Pros

Multi National Company with lots of various opportunities to cross train in different areas of the company. It is very well respected in the Finance Community.

Cons

It has its own culture and sometime that is detremential to outside views or change intiatives. Our way or the highway,

Advice to Senior Management

Don't repeat the mistakes of past management--Don't let profits lead to over spending on non-essential non-auto related business. Stick to the core business.

Pros

The pay is decent and the company is in better shape than other auto

Cons

You need a mentor, no matter how good you are if you don't have one (and a powerful one) you have no business to do here.

Advice to Senior Management

Think for the good of the company, not for your personal gain.

Pros

Always paid higher wages and excellent benefits available -this job enabled me to have a decent home and educate our children and provides for a satisfying retirement.

Cons

Promotions are not generally offered to hourly employees unless hourly are willing to switch over to salaried positions.

Advice to Senior Management

listen to your hourly employees with a more open mind

Pros

Good salary, good benefits, able to move to new positions every couple years

Cons

Old boy network in place, very political

Advice to Senior Management

Improve performance appraisel system

Pros

Flexibility to dedicate portion of time for free thinking and research. Flexible hours. Pay is OK.

Cons

Research and advance is becoming just advance at Ford. Getting promotion is very hard. It is not a good place to progress for young engineers. It works for ''loud'' show off people with connection much better (I guess it is the case for all big companies)

Advice to Senior Management

Too much pressure to make sure research projects will lead to products results in short sight decision makings.