Genzyme Reviews

I worked at Genzyme

Pros – Great benefits.

Fellow employees at the same level are friendly, competent and believe in teamwork.

Cons – Top heavy managment. A six member team will have three layers of management before the senior managment level.

No faith in management. Decisions are made in a vacuum without considering the impact on the people who have to perform the work. Managment is viewed as being very arogant becasue of this type of behavior.

The 80/20 rule is the norm - 20% of the people are doing 80% of the work.

Advice to Senior Management – Get your house in order. You have too many levels between you and the workers. Most managers were mediocre in their prior managment roles becasue and what they really wanted is a management position because "that's where the money is".

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend

I have been working at Genzyme

Pros – People at Genzyme really believe in what they're doing. Lots of folks are intensely committed to the mission to bring treatment to patients who have no other options.

Cons – The company has grown too big without updating how it operates. Senior management doesn't understand how to run a large, diverse company. Communication is poor. No clear paths for career development; you have to fight to get opportunities even if you're a very highly rated performer.

Advice to Senior Management – Need to overhaul the way the company operates without losing the founding values. Physicians are not necessarily the people who should lead. Get a CMO who can inspire people and a COO who knows how to run a complex organization.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend

I have been working at Genzyme

Pros – Challenging, high through put, Great work environment

Cons – Not much room for advancement without advanced degree

Advice to Senior Management – Fix manufacturing jobs

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend

I have been working at Genzyme

Pros – You get paid a lot with great benefits for the amount of work required of you.
The HQ is the nicest building I've ever worked in.
Stock Options (RSUs) for all.

Cons – Very little communication.
Company is headed downhill.
People have massive egos because they have big titles but little responsibilities. You need to be able to stroke people's egos and be a yes-man to be successful.
Management never fixes long-standing problems.
Business practices aren't always ethical but it takes a while to figure that out.
Nobody does anything which is really frustrating if you are trying to accomplish something....or worse, need to accomplish something.

Advice to Senior Management – Sell the company and let someone else run it.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend

I have been working at Genzyme

Pros – Great benefits, laid back place to work as well as the salary compensation. Groups are willing to help one another.

Cons – No room to move up in my career. There is a skewed morality compass and values are placed on things not as important as developing a process correctly the first time.

Advice to Senior Management – Managers should be more open to employee opinions and not punish when there is a disagreement. They should be more steadfast behind their decisions, not ambivilent.

I worked at Genzyme

Pros – Some of the best reasons is that they are not "corporate" in the sense, that they don't write you up for every little thing. They were fairly flexible with myself as a single parent.

Cons – Extremely top heavy in management. For my department we had 3 employees, a manager and a Supervisor. They don't write you up for everything, they just fire you. I wrote an email to my manager about innapropriate behavior between himself and my coworker and that I was feeling uncomfortable, and instead of changing that, they let me go.

Advice to Senior Management – There is no need to have all of those managers and supervisors (like AP for example). Promoting employees is nice but not to where you have more "chiefs" than you do "indians"

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend

I worked at Genzyme

Pros – The benefits are truly excellent. There are opportunities to learn a lot of things on the job. There has never been layoffs.

Cons – Scientific management is completely lost and in way over their heads. In most cases, Genzyme has promoted its management based on loyalty and longevity, rather than merit, and it shows. There needs to be a significant restructuring of management and no one seems to have the spine to tackle this problem.

Probably, the least flat organization ever evolved. There are literally many hundreds of VPs across the organization who do VERY little and ring up huge salaries in the process. Decision making is slow as molasses and far too many people are deemed experts in fields they know little about. Identification of talent is weak.

Advice to Senior Management – You have had a good run and have built the company from a small endeavor into a global conglomerate. You should be proud. But like a world class poker player, you have to know when to hold 'em and when to fold 'em. Obviously the company is doing very poorly with recent drops in earnings, regulatory failures, and all sorts or embarassing news releases regarding the sad state of affairs in manufacturing. I hold you 100% accountable for these failures. Do you hold yourself accountable? You claim the buck stops with you but actions speak louder than words.

I think senior management should show some accountability and leadership and just resign. There are much better and smarter leaders internally and externally. Your management style and strategy is boring, old school, and not sufficient for a modern innovative workforce. Let some people with new and fresh ideas rise up and take the company where it needs to go in the future. The time is now.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend

I have been working at Genzyme

Pros – Great pay,
Great Benefits
Great place to work

Cons – Some of the IT managers are do not know how to manage. They got promoted just because the company was making tons of money and growing in past.

Advice to Senior Management – Major IT management shakeup is needed to reshape this organization.

I worked at Genzyme

Pros – It is with out a doubt one of the better places to build a solid foundation of both experience as well as resume padding if you are looking to break into industry coming out of undergrad

Cons – As with all research labs, your interaction is limited largely to your PM and possibly the other teams that share your lab

Advice to Senior Management – Management does a pretty fair job making themselves available to their team, and I think that is crucial to building team cooperation

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend

I worked at Genzyme

Pros – Truly innovative company with lots of opportunities for growth - in certain business units. Fun, supportive environment that still maintains an entrepreneurial edge.

Cons – Remuneration not well aligned across different business units. In addition, career advancement opportunities vary according to the part of the business you're working for. Some sites not well set up to manage career development.

Advice to Senior Management – Work harder to provide employees with options for continued professional development, as the current seemingly-haphazard approach can cause disillusionment and lead to people leaving the company.