Symcor Reviews

Pros

Most of the coworkers are friendly and nice to work with. They are very understanding.

Cons

They pay is not so great.

Advice to Senior Management

The mailroom should have more state-of-the-art equipment to make the processing of mails more efficient. This would save time and make it possible for a greater volume of mail being processed each day.

Pros

- Working environment is decent, and I met a lot of good people who became good friends. Working hours are also flexible.

Cons

- Lack of advancement opportunities and lack of investment from the company to the young employees. It is really hard to get approved for training courses.

Advice to Senior Management

Senior management always seems to say the right thing in the townhall meetings, however, nothing seems to change after the meeting.

Pros

- Easy work
- Good rewards
- Evenings timings (good for part-time positions)

Cons

The problem with Symcor is that this job does now allow you to use your brains AT ALL. For people who would like a more challenging job that gives you satisfaction, and not just the $$ at the end of the day, please dont work here.
Plus, they make you stay until 11:30/12 every time you work.
The management doesn't really interact with the workers.
The training procedures are horrible. You will struggle to learn.

Advice to Senior Management

Better and longer training schedules
Rotations - to allow more challenges to employees

Pros

- Friendly employee environment
- Compensation good
- Flexible work hours & benefits

Cons

- Bad management decisions
- Sales made cannot compensate the lost = layoffs
- Staffing to volume
- Do not recognize contribution made by knowledgeable staff
-Fire/Hire the wrong people

Advice to Senior Management

Tribal knowledge won't stay if the transition is not smooth. Rethink the strategy and acknowledge contribution made by employees who have worked there since inception.

Pros

New company in U.S. market

Cons

Analysis paralysis made for a slow pace on projects

Advice to Senior Management

Improve knowledge on US regulations

Pros

The people at Symcor were very friendly, and very helpful. They communicated with their employees well, and gave great advice.

Cons

The hours during the week were late at night, and unless it was a busy week (not often), I would only work about 8 hours a week.

Advice to Senior Management

Hire less employees if your going to only give them about eight hours a week. Wasn't earning enough to be worth staying

Pros

Benefits are decent, flexibility in time off, fairness to employees who are let go.
Some stability in certain divisions as there is limited competition.

Cons

A lot of smoke and mirrors from Senior Management. Corporate "plans" are well known within the Executive, but the "how" is very poorly communicated to regional sites. Symcor failed to act on economic downturns and is now in the process of laying off hundreds of employees in order to save enough money to remain "competitive"

Pros

Vacation time, holiday time and federal days off are great. For the most part, employees all get along with each other.

Cons

It is really obvious that management has there own favorite employees that they make exceptions for while other employees are written up or called in to the office for counseling sessions. The company does provide 5 days sick time pay but the rules that they have if you have an occurence is ridiculous. Management has staff meetings with employees going over the company rules and regulations. However, the "favorite" employees constantly break the rules and are not held accountable. For example, talking on the phone non-stop through the day with family members. Talking on their cell phone or text messaging throughout the day, unprofessional and disruptive.

Pros

Fast paced environment with variety of jobs and shifts. Some really great people work at Symcor despite the low morale.

Cons

No respect for workers,especially in relation to having a life outside of work.
Recent downsizing extremely detrimental to employee morale.

Advice to Senior Management

If the cut backs continue its time to look at the senior management level. In order for this company to turn around some major cuts need to be made at the senior level. In other words the decision makers are doing an extremely bad job and someone needs to look at them instead of getting rid of all the great people and making the remaining people miserable.

Pros

This place used to be a great place to work at. Lots of knowledgeable people. Great ideas, great skills, and people willing to help each other out. There still is a lot of good people working there.

Cons

The company has been on a downward spiral ever since 2008. Large projects getting canceled. Lots and lots of mass layoffs. They're starting to get out of the rock of outsourcing, but it may be too little too late. This company used to be about innovation and creating the next new thing. Now, it's all about maintaining and servicing existing infrastructure.

Furthermore, it has way too many bureaucratic processes in place, and still trying to put in more, in an attempt to be like the big companies. It tries to act like a big company, but unable to handle that burden. The simplest tasks will get lost in paperwork.

Upper management/leadership is not good at communicating with its technology staff. All technical issues and concerns will be trumped by decisions of "following process". Middle management is actually filled with good smart people, but they are usually powerless to do anything, because the company is too process-driven for them to do any real change. The only time that any issue is dealt with in a quick manner is when there is an emergency production issue. We're constantly fighting active fires, and not able to proactively prevent them beforehand.

On the last sets of employee opinion surveys, all scores concerning trust/faith/communications with upper management/leadership has been LOW and getting LOWER. There've actually been a few scores of ZERO on some of those questions.

This place really used to be a great place to work at. But all the leadership that used to have great vision and appreciation for technology and technical staff are all gone. What's left is a leadership that does not value technology resource at all, and simply interested in maintaining what services that is left. This company is at this moment, not a place for growth at all.

Advice to Senior Management

- Quit it with the gimmicky town hall meetings. The employees you have are actually pretty smart, and is able to see through any gimmicks and lip service you put out. It insults our intelligence when you say things purely for lip service.
- The reason there's not a lot of cooperation between departments isn't because the communication is not there. It is because of the arcane processes in place that makes changes and project planning next to impossible. Most project managers have to keep two sets of books (one for how to keep it in line with how PARM needs it to make it work, and one for truly getting projects going). This is a huge waste of time and effort. This really handcuffs the ability of smart people to do anything resembling creativity.
- Take some responsibility and accountability for the communication problems. Get feedback directly from your "on the field" technical staff. And apply some REAL changes to company processes, changes to allow your technical staff to work. Your attempts at guessing and extrapolating from the survey hasn't been accurate at all and in fact adds to the hindrance.
- Tell the company when unpopular decisions are made. Don't "stealth" layoff entire departments and expect the remaining staff not to know about it.