Rain Bird Reviews

Pros

salary is best reason to work for Rain Bird

Cons

Incompetence among managers
A few Directors who are also incompetent
decisions that are made for singled out employees who are not even allowed input into those decisions.
Lack of competence in judging future markets
Lack of ability to recognize the great employees that they have fired, and the mediocre that they have kept. Not all ,but some.

Advice to Senior Management

Allow all employees to have input into decisions that affect them.
Look at your Directors closely! Some are over bearing and without merit to the position.
Some simply make lousy decisions.
Keeping employees on the edge and feeling as if they do not have job security is not the way to produce the best from each employee. Tony, from someone who has owned a business and comes from a family of business owners, step back and look at the Directors! They are making bad decisions. Look at your BEST employees from every division. Talk with them personally. Get feed back and what they feel about Rain Bird. A man who puts forth his very best is a man who feels his ideas and thoughts are important and serving to the company he works for.

Pros

The people are great, the pay is ok,. They help you with school and have really good benefits.

Cons

Management is management, and the lower level employees are often left out of decision making. It's bad for morale. They need to involve everyone.

Advice to Senior Management

Management really needs to look at more than the bottom line. You have good people, working very hard. Their expectations are high and unrealistic given the reductions in staff. Something has to give.

Pros

Rain Bird hires the best.
High turn over allows better than normal networking

Cons

Little to no communication regarding company direction.
Strategic direction appears to change significantly from year to year
General lack of trust from Management

Advice to Senior Management

Create a three to five year strategic direction, minimize any changes and communicate it to the entire company so that everyone can understand how thier efforts support the plan.

Pros

Pay is very good for the Tucson market, and benefits are decent. Rain Bird makes a quality product and has the potential to be a truly great company.

Cons

Where do I start?
1. No advancement opportunities.
2. No employee recognition or appreciation, period. Please, don't pretend to actually care about us! What kind of company doesn't even have a holiday party?
3. Constant turnover, especially in areas such as sales and product management positions.
4. Lots of effort and money put into recruiting OVERQUALIFIED PEOPLE (your co-workers will have advanced degrees from top universities and great job experience) but NO effort made to retain anyone. Everyone is expendable!
5. Constant "layoffs" are used to get rid of people who make too much money. A blind eye is turned to the fact that they are the ones with the product knowledge and experience the company needs.
6. Many job functions moving to Mexico. As soon as they do, they turn to crap.
7. No job security at all (see numbers 4 - 6 above!)
8. Lack of communication within the company leads to no one having any direction or idea where the company is going.
9. No leadership from management or directors.
10. No effort is made to value the homeowner (who uses the product) or the distributor/contractor (who is out there selling the product!)
11. Forced ranking makes the environment ridiculously cutthroat. You will be ranked against people who have jobs that are completely different from yours. I was ranked against people in Mexico who I had never even met. And watch out if you are on the bottom! Also, forced rankings make it hard to work as a "team".

Advice to Senior Management

Sell the company to someone who is actually competent to run it. Value your stakeholders! If you have no one working for you and buying your product, how do you make money?

Pros

Rain Bird has great name recognition in the industry and has very good product quality. There are a lot of very talented people at Rain Bird.

Cons

There is very little information shared with the employees at Rain Bird. The company also has very high turnover in many areas.

Advice to Senior Management

Rain Bird should share more information between employees and groups. Rain Bird should also focus on making less arbitrary decisions when firing employees.

Pros

Great pay!!! Coworkers are phenomenal...they care and work very hard; they are intelligent; they have become great friends (one even became my husband!).

Cons

Where do I even begin?! This place has the worst corporate culture of any place I've seen! Cut throat, unnecessarily competitive, the antithesis of collaborative, spiteful, and unprofessional. If you do end up working here, you try to change things for the better, but everyone I've known who has done this (which is perhaps 85-90%) get met with opposition and are stonewalled. You have to play the game of rolling over people to the detriment of teamwork and sound business practices to even remotely succeed. Rain Bird is a good place for people with no souls.

Advice to Senior Management

Tony's way of doing business will be the downfall of this company. Open up your SBUs so they can communicate and stop competing and replicating efforts.

Pros

Decent pay, robust processes, commitment to quality, commitment to growth, stable business in tough economy, appears to be economically sound with conservative decisions regarding spending.

Cons

More secretive than the CIA. Information is tough to come by, revolving door for many positions, aggressive ranking system that fosters distrust.

Advice to Senior Management

The should realize the way they operate, it will make them warped in their thinking and make them @#$ kissers the rest of their lives.

Pros

There are lots of great people that work for Rain Bird. It is a company that has a good reputation.

Cons

There are cutbacks taking place all of the time. Rain Bird is hiring plenty of managers but keeps cutting back on the staff that supports them.

Advice to Senior Management

Remember who the people are that support you. If you keep cutting back you might be doing their job one day.

Pros

Starting salary somewhat competitive for Tucson
One of few Manufacturers in Tucson
Benefits adequate
Decent product
Hires mostly very bright people

Cons

Revolving door on key employees and managers, why no one stays ??? Interesting
OVER use and abuse of temporary employees
KNOWN as "worst" employer in Tucson
No Management support]
Caustic culture
Bonus and rewards promised at hire, never materialize

Advice to Senior Management

Get some professionals at the top and make sure ownership takes the time to listen to them.
Establish some respect for the individual

Pros

Compenstation was the reason for going and working there as long as I did. I was eventually tired of the place adn realize that no amount of money makes it worth it.

Cons

It is the same as most other reports about the Bird, no leadership at all and weak kneed upper managment.

Advice to Senior Management

The should realize the way they operate, it will make them warped in their thinking and make them ___ kissers the rest of their lives.