General Mills Reviews in Lodi, CA

Pros – This is a very good place to work. People are friendly.

Cons – Union workers can be lazy. Often minorities are promoted over more qualified people. OEM's don't always work out well.

Advice to Senior Management – Take into consideration more of what an employee has done to deserve a promotion and less consideration should be given to what demographics are. Get away from the UNION!!! Union Employees can be lazy.

Pros – GM faired the recession well, stable, reasonably safe place to work (unless they decide to eliminate your position as they do periodically get on a reduce head count kick when they show a lack of loyalty to non-management personnel)
Good place to start for young fresh out of college people
Very focused on diversity, great place to be a minority

Cons – I've read a lot of positive reviews and even news articles about General Mills being rated one of the best places to work and I would love to work there. Reading the article and the reviews you realize this mainly applies to corporate headquarters where as Lodi(and probably most manufacturing faciltiies) don't receive these benefits.
Work life balance is horrible. In just the past few years alone, they have launched a large number of very time intensive initiatives at the same time reducing head count and management seems to just expect the work force to work the extra hours to sucessfully do their regular jobs and complete the initiatives as well.
Favoritism is shown towards minorities who receive promotions and are hired in front of more experienced non-minority workers (so much for 1 Culture) and young employees who receive automatic promotions
Management recognizes there some big problems in Lodi but their attempts at a solution are laughable - they do occasionally talk about work-life balance usually in meetings where they are rolling out yet another initiative to load us up with work. The Great Manager Initiative to actually train managers on being leaders was an abject failure not that it was taken seriously by the work force anyway.
General Mills problems seem to stem mainly from promoting inexperienced people way too fast who are in no way prepared to perform their duties. Management across the board in Lodi doesn't seem to know what the core duties of a manager are. They don't oversee their work force, they provide no support whatsoever, they spend all their time in meetings with other members of the Senior Leadership Team or Minneapolis so that they can pass on yet another requirement for us to do our jobs or more work. The plant could be on fire and rather than roll up their sleeves to help you can rest assured they will be standing behind you looking over your shoulder telling you to work faster and reminding you of any mistakes you made.
There are four types of people working in Lodi:
1) Hourly who are well paid and well coddled, we just awarded them an hour and half of breaks in an 8 hour day(unlike Salary people who are lucky to sneak in a 10 min lunch)
2)Young professionals who are there for a short term rotation and will leave in 2-3 years (with a sigh of relief)
3) Older employees nearing retirement (and not soon enough)
4) Middle aged proffessionals who will never be promoted anywhere and are praying for the economy to turn around soon so they can find work elsewhere
Last but not least raises; the past several years have been pathetic even at the max scale on the performance rating, the raises are awful. This was true even when General Mills had a banner year financially.

Advice to Senior Management – 1) Learn how to be a manager
2) Support your people they are your most valuable resource
3) Staff up in operations and maintenance - you will not achieve nor sustain your goals with a skeleton crew in these key positions. So many of the problems today stem from the cutbacks in Salary staffing done years ago, why can't they learn a lesson from history?)
4) Get out of your office and onto the floor - know what your people are doing
5) Focus on important things and cut out the nonproductive work (there is entirely too much work just so some one can check a box that it was done)
6) Understand that you get what you pay for, you want to keep good people then reward them.