Newell Rubbermaid Reviews

Pros

Great young culture and people. Ability to work in cross functional teams and take on bigger projects. Exposure to many parts of the company and fun employee events when a new product is being released. Great work life balance.

Cons

Smaller company. Employee layoffs based on economy. Sometimes a lot of responsibility due to lack of full team. Not very technical work.

Advice to Senior Management

There are a lot of good engineers there, make sure to value them and recognize their hard work. Have more loyalty to employees.

Pros

You work with great people every day in a beautiful building with a cafeteria, gym and employee store. *Some* managers know and understand the business and groom their reports to excel and move forward in their career paths. Company car and fleet gas card for all sales people is a great perk.

Cons

Pay is lower than competition. Benefits exist, but are poor and more expensive to the employee than competition. No employee stock program. Newell as a corporation does not care about their employees or the community.

Advice to Senior Management

Newell wants to be perceived as a consumer-driven, marketing-focused, branded organization and while some GBUs/functions are moving in the right direction, most functions are not capable of supporting a #1 brand. Think about building a long-term, stable business, not just this quarter's initiatives.
Laying off people to make the P&L look better for Wall Street creates a miserable working environment. Newell recruits amazing people, but loses most after only a few years due to layoffs or people leaving because the company just simply does not care about them, their development and their careers.

Pros

Salary, good people and a decent work life balance.

Cons

Direction and strategy changes often based on perception of the street.

Pros

used to be a stable company to work for, competitive benefits and opportunities to advance, as well as employee purchase programs.

Cons

constant management reorganization, most recent GM for my group had no clue about the industry we were in.

Advice to Senior Management

stability is good

Pros

Beautiful Atlanta office, young crowd, nice ammenities, lots of opportunities on projects, great exposure to upper management

Cons

pay, benefits, promotions go to only those who managers personally like; has nothing to do with competence or experience. Very old school upper management, business is declining in most categories. layoffs.

Advice to Senior Management

Appreciate the people who are willing to rock the boat to drive positive change.

Pros

Exposure to senior leadership, friendly and open community, lots of room for growth

Cons

Not many opportunities for global movement

Pros

Good salary, nice people, very professional and formal culture, way too many IT people supporting SAP and similar IT projects

Cons

Was very risk adverse. Focused on execution not long term brand building. Looked only for low hanging fruit vs. investments in technology, supply chain partners, and true brand building

Advice to Senior Management

Partner with more innovative organizations to leverage skills and opportunities. Listen to consumers not marketing managers, sales and customers only.

Pros

entrepreneurial environment
great employee resource groups
Kind, helpful people

Cons

Inexperienced mid-management
Inconsistencies across brand managers

Advice to Senior Management

Better development of mid-managers to truely be leaders to their teams

Pros

Great internship program
Hands-on SAP experience
Opportunity to work with members from various different GBUs
Positive guidance from managers

Cons

Not much bad to say, because I had a great experience as an intern. Perhaps consider concrete projects for summer interns.

Pros

You sometimes get some free products, especially from all the rejected "ideas". Worked with a lot of very nice people, many of which were very smart and business saavy - coming from a variety of different backgrounds.

Cons

Poor leadership; no vision; no articulated strategy. For a consumer goods company they have a very limited view and use of consumer insight even though they talk a big story.

Advice to Senior Management

We are in the 21st century - wake-up and smell the coffee. You do not encourage employees to consider new ways of doing things, you are very hierarchical and you over-inflate consumer's evaluation of your brands.