Honeywell Specialty Materials Reviews

Pros

Honeywell was very established with the goals and objectives they'd strive to achieve. A very structured organization along with excellent benefits.

Cons

The downside while working for Honeywell was the ongoing operational changes which lead to morale issues and lack of confidence held by the production workers.

Advice to Senior Management

As stated, the overall goals and objectives were clearly defined from a corporate standpoint. The advice I'd give would be to research or determine whether or not those objectives are achievable within every business unit.

Pros

Smart hardworking people dedicated to business

Cons

Benefits and Environment need improvement

Pros

A lot of nice people that you work with. Great location to work. Site is old but becoming better with great potential.

Cons

The site planning aspect needs some work. Small departments lead to long working hours and little recognition for accomplishments. Needs improvement in multiple areas to become a leading company.

Advice to Senior Management

Communication of future projects and advancements necessary to secure site future apart from just making pounds. Validate excellent accomplishments through title changes.

Pros

Smart people, many acquisitions, intl. growth

Cons

Frequent re-orgs. Too many organization changes.

Advice to Senior Management

Focus on mid term and short term

Pros

You will be able to say you worked for a Fortune 100 company. You will earn an average salary. You will learn what it is like to work for a large organization.

Cons

You will struggle with cumbersome business systems that are poorly supported. You will work in plants that are poorly maintained. Safety and environmental excellence are given lip service but minimal funding. Honeywell's safety and environmental programs are paper heavy and ineffective, kind of like BP's emergency plan for their deep water rig in the Gulf of Mexico. Their HS&E programs are digital equivalents to three ring binders full of paper that no one updates, looks at or trains on. Management will ask you to certify you comply with all safety, environmental regulations and that you are up to date on all relevant training but you will work at a facility with no trainers or HR people. You will be punished if you bring safety or environmental items that cost money to fix to you bosses attention . Safety and environmental departments will be understaffed or frequently those areas will be an ancillary responsibility of someone with a different full time job. Their corporate safety and environmental departments are pretty much there to give upper management plausible deniability and direct blame to low level managers.

Advice to Senior Management

Stop worrying about the next quarters net income long enough to clean up your facilities. Hire a sufficient number of safety and environmental engineers and trainers and fund the programs. The HR, training, purchasing and account receivable staffs (among others) have been replaced by computer programs requiring individual employees to basically perform all those functions for themselves therefore you should at least have sufficient IT resources to support the software packages you use. Even then your minimalistic staffing philosophy with a management base with high turn over is no way to operate chemical plants that produce, store and ship highly hazardous materials often in urban environments.

Pros

nice environment and good benefits

Cons

expectation of seasoned employees low.

Advice to Senior Management

low productivity of some employees burdensom on high performing employees. Bar should be raised/

Pros

A solid international company with a lot of opportunities for advancement and alternate career direction. Flexible work schedule being able to start/leave up to 1 hour in early or late than core hours.

Cons

401K match was reduced to 50% of previous benefit and forced to take 2 weeks off with out pay because business is slow. Health insurance is very expensive.

Advice to Senior Management

The company should reinstate some of the benefits that were removed when business was slow since the current employee moral is low.

Pros

Valuable hands on experience from a leader in the industry.

Cons

Furloughs, bad attitudes from old timers. Company taking benefits away.

Advice to Senior Management

None

Pros

Very professional and fair. Good benefits package. Many resources available for R&D work including software, patent searching, literature searching. Many networking opportunities within the company, including international.

Cons

This corporation is very large. As a result, the reasons behind decisions made at the corporate level can be very hard to understand at the local level. Agility and general ability to respond quickly to changing market conditions can be slow.

Advice to Senior Management

Need to improve sensitivity to customers when communicating decisions not to engage in business. Sometimes customers have difficulty understanding why Honeywell does not want to engage in small volume business when it could help Honeywell's position with respect to large volume products.

Pros

The equipment breaks a lot, so it's easy to see the guts of the equipment to really get a feel for how the place operates. The operators are very friendly, as long as you aren't pompous, and the engineering staff are very competent.

Cons

For a co-op, there is not a lot of personal interaction between you and the engineers - most of them are very geared towards keeping it a "work only" environment.

Advice to Senior Management

The leadership is very strong. Everyone is very well organized and each one has the potential to reach higher up on the corporate ladder.