Jackson Laboratory Reviews

Pros

lots of opportunity to progress.
interesting work

Cons

competitive environment with lots of talented people

Advice to Senior Management

keep doing what you doing, i enjoy the work and projects

Pros

Acadia National Park surrounds the attractive campus and small-town life means no gangs, few drugs, low crime rate, etc. Fantastic place to raise kids and to enjoy outdoor activities. Some nice benefits like a turkey, ham, or fruit basket (or donate same to charity) for every employee at Xmas. Some (rare) managers are truly fantastic.

Cons

Management skills are frequently sorely lacking as most senior and junior managers are people with Ph.D. in science with no management training or natural skills. Professional development is nonexistent for software employees.

Pros

You get the technical skills and experience you need quickly, through the daily demands of an insane work schedule, to attain a real career position at a real company.

Cons

A regular work week is 10 hours/day M-F and then your weekend is coming in for 6 hours here, or 4 hours there depending on the demands from being short staffed. Work-life balance is non- existent. If you have plans outside of work supervisors will expect you to cancel them to stay late while they leave early. There is too much work for too little people in In Vivo and this is known by upper management yet ignored to meet the bottom line and accomplish their yearly bonus incentives.

Advice to Senior Management

Decrease the workload expected out of technicians to maintain a reasonable work week of 45-50hrs. Increase employee compensation and show appreciation for all that they accomplish for you on a daily basis. Finally, expect from your employees what you expect out of yourself; it's utterly ridiculous that technicians are required to put their lives on hold to stay late and come in on weekends while other members of the "team" are out the door or home already.

Pros

Jackson Laboratory allows for the flexible working hours and sometimes work from home. Bar Harbor is a very nice place to live.

Cons

This place is good for biologists, but not other technical professionals. The training opportunity is very limited if you are not biologist.

Pros

Great research happening here. Very academic atmosphere, exciting to hear about all the great advances coming from the scientists. Largest employer in Hancock County, one of the biggest in Maine. Your co-workers and peers are great, as are the scientists at all levels. Management and administration, not so much.

Cons

Housing costs in Bar Harbor/MDI are very high so odds are you'll need to commute from Trenton, Lamoine or Ellsworth. Commuting in the summer can take a long time.

Advice to Senior Management

JaxFit makes me sad. Having to bring our 'passport' to places and get 'stamped' in order to decrease our health insurance deductible is insulting, degrading and humiliating. We are not grade schoolers, show some respect and trust in your employees.

Pros

New facility
Some of the coworkers that are down to earth are still here (only very few)
Very hard working folks (taken for granted)
Oh, and 2 big screen tvs in the breakroom

Cons

Non profit trying to run like corporate, without the money
Lots of gossip
Have to fight for your job, even though you cant get goals accomplished
Lack of teamwork and communication, even though they want that environment
Lots of people are miserable but dont want to leave
Unfairness in how people are treated
Too many politics for a nonprofit research
High turnover rates
Inconsistincies within Sac facility and across both coast facilities
Lots of frustration throughout the facility
They dont want to fire people because they dont want to pay unemployment

Advice to Senior Management

Follow through with what you say you are going to do. Listen to your folks, dont just say "yes" when we really know you mean "no". Also, there are some very intelligent people working for you that you continue to refuse to listen to, and still listen to the bottom dwelling bum kissers that are making the high dollar mistakes throughout the facility. And how many more supervisors/ leads do we really need? How about just letting us do our work for once without changing it every 5 minutes. I have worked with this company for awhile, and feel so dragged down and disrespected that I can't even believe we are still operating when I know so many others feel this way too. I think at one point you even wanted to hire immigrants to do the work so there would be less complaining? I don't know how we are supposed to get on the top 100 places to work out here in Sacramento when you dont take your employees seriously, dont listen, and continue to be stubborn or incognizant about true changes that need to take place. You really need to nurture people, give them more resources for work/life balance and fun. And stop making it seem like production runs the show, there are far more other people here working just as hard.

Pros

The lower level employee's are like family,very conciderate of others.

Cons

Certain managers treat individuals differantly than others as far as promotions. It should be based on merits and past experience and performance reviews not on who they are firends with.

Certain areas there is intimidation, managers towards employee's

Certain areas,a blind eye is applied to certain actions of emplyee's but others are held accountable for their actions by mangers. ie one sided views and disiplinary actions.

Advice to Senior Management

There needs to be a 360 review applied to managers from employee's so that the senior managment team can be aware of how the managers are treating their employee's as far as shareing important information,respect,handleing issues within their department and overall support of the mission that the institution is provideing.

When it comes to guidelines,rules,disiplinary actions everybody should be treated with the same standards and respect and be informed to obide the same rules and guidelines and be subjected to the same standards and disiplinary actions. That is not always the case.

Example: You have 2 people that are at the same level position,same pay level,same requirements.
One walks around all day from person to person discussing what is going on in their life,what they did during the weekend,what they are planning on doing on vacation,and so on.

Then you have the other employee doing what is required by the institution earning their pay and applying themselves totally to their duties and abideing to the rules and guidelines.

When certain managers are approached about the issue at hand ,it is ignored until pressure builds up,then the person that addresses the issue is usually the one that getscalled to the office and spoken to. Not the person that is not applying themselves or following the guidelines stated by the institution.

Pros

The people that I work with are some of the best technicians I've ever worked with. Very skilled technicians, hard working, and great talent. The job duties itself are pretty amazing you learn a lot about a lot of things. The work load is really crazy. Its a sink or swim type of place.

Cons

Upper management are the worst. Bar Harbor I hear is a great place to work, but thats not the case in sacramento. You have to beg for supplies that you need. People are expected to over see 10-15 different studies, and do technical work and not make mistakes. Management has said they were going to make changes to make the technicians life better. . . lies! Really the worst thing is that we are over worked and underpaid. Under appreciated is the life at Jax -west.

Advice to Senior Management

Appreciate your staff! You cant expect to work people this hard and have them not make mistakes. Stop lying to your staff about what your going to do, In fact, stop having meeting all together. nothing gets accomplished. nothing ever changes. why have them? Communicate with your technicians better; Fire people that are dead weight, and hire people that can succeed at a sink or swim job. Pay your employee's more. Being a non-profit isn't an excuse to treat people like this. The education system seems to be able able to pay more than you with WAY less expectations. And the education system is talking about cutting PE programs because of lack of money. how can they pay signifigantly more than jax? You cant make things better without spending more money. either hire more staff (and make work conditions better) or pay us more. stop thinking about your bottom line so much. . . your a non-profit remember!

Pros

The people care very much about the mission and non-profit work. Working at the Lab has the potential to give back to the medical and pharmaceutical communities in a big way.

Cons

The services part of the lab is very conservative and is incapable of growth. Any change or initiative is seen as a risk and is to be avoided at all costs.

Advice to Senior Management

Lots of the Junior managers are taking leadership courses. I don't see any of the mid to senior -level managers applying the basic lessons we are learning. It's pretty disappointing, this place has huge potential with some real leadership. I'd like to see the yearly survey put back in place, it seemed to be the only feedback anyone took seriously.

Pros

Best reasons: Vacation/Sick time. At one time I would of said it was because Rick Woychik was leading the Jackson Lab. He cared what his employees thought and instituted a lab wide review once a year to get inpute from everyone at the lab. He showed that he cared about the people that the Lab employed by taking an interest in us!

Cons

Not enough feed back from supervisors on the job you are doing, they tend to tell you only what they feel you should know, we tend to learn the rest from gossip. They are not always truthful and seem to fight communication. If Supervisors were more proactive in communicating with their employees, maybe there would not be a need for the amount of gossip there is at the lab!

Advice to Senior Management

When we use to have a survey done once a year at the Lab. It seemed that the managers were more concerned with who said what. Maybe they should be more proactive in dealing with the problems instead of just emailing people after the survey was done, saying, "If you need to talk with me please feel free". Then after emailing this to their employees, they feel that they have done everything they could to deal with the department problems and nothing else gets done. Rick Woychik cared about the employees and showed it in everything he did at the Lab. Now that he is gone, I hope that the Lab does not go back the the way it use to be before Rick came to the Lab!