John Deere Landscapes Reviews

Pros

Outdoors
Meet new people
Drive bob cat

Cons

Cold winters and dusty days
Rainy days
Heavy lifting

Advice to Senior Management

Give the customer the benefit of the doubt

Pros

Brand recognition and closeness of team in the field.

Cons

Senior Managers out of touch
No clear direction of which way company was headed.

Pros

good work life balance and nice company to stay for long time

Cons

time restrictions are really friustating

Advice to Senior Management

be more flexibe

Pros

It's John Deere, and the various lines they sell

Cons

being micro managed, lack of comminication

Advice to Senior Management

none

Pros

John Deere Landscapes offers a high paced work environment where you are encouraged to sharpen your professional and personal skills.

Cons

The feeling of just being a number can be a downside of working for a large corporation like John Deere Landscapes.

Advice to Senior Management

I believe one of the best opportunities John Deere Landscapes has is focusing on the merchandising all of the branches consistantly.

Pros

Benefits are pretty good - little to no micromanagement - work for a company with name brand - tough business sector to be in now - construction is very slow - made great friendships - lots of freedom - good career start or mid career job -

Cons

too much corporate stuff - too much reporting - not enough time to do your job - everything is about profit - what ever it takes to make a profit - laying off front line employees at the expense of losing sales and ablity to complete daily work - senior managers are very removed from day to day activities to understand the workplace challanges and amount of work that is done - focus constantly changes and direction is confusing at times - lack of identity is noticeable

Advice to Senior Management

spend time with the front line employees and become part of the customer's solution. Put in place a strategic identity and company culture that everyone can embrace, understand and like. Create an enviroment where customers want to come into the stores because they like doing business with you.

Pros

Face to face with clients. Mainly out of office. Good benefits. Name recognition.

Cons

Management not knowing how to incorporate golf channel into the market effectively. Continued loss of market share to competition.

Advice to Senior Management

Understanding of the Golf channel needed. Better support. Decrease the amount of internal reporting to increase sales opportunities face to face with clients.

Pros

Their are very few restriction on how to manage your duties. You are given the tools to sell and a great product to sell. The people and the job are great.

Cons

This is a very sales driven region, but the operational duties become prohibitive. There is very little time to sell anything. Management is so far removed from the front lines that the have no idea what the day to day activities consist of. Work load mounts while staff continued to diminish. Management style is like it or leave it, they are not interested in the well being of the employee. The answer to everything is work more.

Advice to Senior Management

Work closer to the front lines and catch people doing the right thing. Threats do not get results, teamwork and acknowledgement of hard work do.

Pros

Highly ethical company in most areas.
Local level management is pretty good. Very little micro management.
Weekly paychecks.
Nationwide company with opportunities to transfer and grow.

Cons

Health care benefits are lacking for a company of this size.
Wages for hourly employees are poor.
They could take a lesson from some of the companies they purchased on how to reward employees for service and performance.

Advice to Senior Management

Get rid of the high deductible medical plan. It's terrible. A $4300.00 a year deductible for a family is way to high. Especially at the low hourly wages this company pays its employees. My sister works for a tiny company and has a much better medical plan than Deere. Do you mean to tell me that a company that has less than 5 million dollars in annual sales can provide it's employees a better medical plan than a company that has over 20 billion dollars in annual sales???