W.W. Grainger Reviews

Pros

Plenty of resources to get the job done.

Cons

The old boy fellowship prevent career advancement

Pros

Company has a commitment to doing whatever it takes to deliver exceptional service to customers. The employees are empowered to make decisions to ensure customers satisfaction

Cons

Large company where you can feel lost at times

Pros

Competitive pay, unlimited resources to continue development , and many business resource groups to join for networking.

Cons

Although there are unlimited resources to aid in development, you can easily get pigeon holed in local markets that form monopolies resulting in no opportunity for promotion.

Advice to Senior Management

Branch Managers should identify the top two employees, formulate a Individual Development Plan. The BM would then check the progression quarterly followed by the District Branch Manager annually. This would ensure the the BM is doing his/her job to aid in development of the individual and the DBM is checking behind them for affectiveness and fairness.

Pros

Good benefits and great way to grow contact network for business or career development.

Cons

Work to the bone with very little reward in the end. You can get caught in a dead end job.

Advice to Senior Management

To much red tape. You may be on track to further your career path and then they make changes in the higher level management and then they change everything the person had started and rework organization layout.

Pros

creative and great people in the company

Cons

processes are very complicated and pople are political.

Advice to Senior Management

more stable organization

Pros

They really do care about their employees and their families.

Cons

Goals go higher and higher every month it seems

Advice to Senior Management

If you're going to give us goals, make them attainable.

Pros

good package, work directly with international team, fast growing

Cons

long decision making process, relatively conservative

Pros

Experience what a public Fortune 500 company is

Cons

Experience what a public Fortune 500 company is..stick with thr private sector for sure!
They tout the fact that they were ranked in Chicagos to 100 places to work ??? Who rated them that?? Nobody I know.

Advice to Senior Management

If you work your people like horses, never saying they do a decent job only telling them how much better they could be, giving paltry raises out, then don't wonder why the moral is so low in the building.

Pros

This is a thriving and forward thinking company not afraid to take the steps to survive in a changing business environment. While a lot of other retailers cling to their catalogs, Grainger embraced online shopping even to the point of cannibalizing their own books. It is a strategy that works.

Cons

Such a big company gets very small with "little chieftens" allowed to run their little empires. Leadership doesn't have the time or care to reign in this layer of insulated bureaucrats and, unfortunately, in some cases abusive bosses. While it is clear that people on the same level as these offenders recognize the patterns of favoritism and abuse as they are repeated over and over by the worst, very sick offenders, they admit they fear for their own jobs and while privately sympathizing with victims, don't do anything.

Advice to Senior Management

There is way too much of a disconnect between leadership and general employees. Your middle management is running amok. When you run anonymous employee satisfaction surveys, don't make the employees sit in mandatory meetings with their supervisors where they have to defend why they answered the questions the way they did! That only encourages lying and wastes a huge amount of time and money. If you care, believe your employees and act on the results of the survey.

Pros

Above average compensation for industry
Industry Leader with great brand recognition
Great retirement plan PST
Top Talent to work with
Access to very large customer opportunities

Cons

Goal setting process inconsistent
at times too much red tape
Too many meetings & conference calls
At times to inflexible at a market level to make quick decisions

Advice to Senior Management

find a way to create sales goals that are more closely aligned to overall company goals. Also try and identify a method to establish goals that reduce dramatic deviations within similar sized sales geographies. Also please start budgeting for 100% of sellers to make sales goals and stop playing with numbers at mid-year to make up for being over budget or give back dollars to make up for either overly aggressive or goals that were too soft.