Woodward Reviews

Pros

Close team Work and new technologies

Cons

Try to promote more from within

Advice to Senior Management

Continue sharing the vision

Pros

1. Decent pay
2. Decent benefits
3. On-site cafeteria with excellent food
4. Fun coworkers

Cons

1. Idiotic, insane management
2. Horrible middle and senior management level office politics
3. Disorganized operations
4. Management often asks for the impossible even after you explain to them why what they want is not a feasible option.
5. Required weekend work whether you like it or not.
6. Management rules like a dictatorship.
7. HR is super scummy. Don't trust them because they will stab you in the back. If you think they exist to help you, it is a lie.
8. Turnover is super high because of the abusive management. I believe more people quit than are hired. This is not the kind of explain where you will expect to work long term.
9. Neverending work loads and hours of meetings that can exceed over 60% of the day. Once I was in a meeting where I was asked to complete a project. I immediately began working on the project after the meeting and 30 minutes later I was brought into another meeting where I had to explain why the project wasn't done yet. Often meetings become so frequent that they basically become an interuptting for doing real work. I also like the meetings that are scheduled either before your shift starts or far after it ends. Imagine getting read to leave at 3:45pm and finding out you have a meeting at 6pm. You better cancel those dinner plans.

Advice to Senior Management

All middle and upper management should be fired. Most are not qualified for the positions they assume and many utilize an archaic management style that would fit right in during the early industrial era of the US.

In all seriousness, management should recognize that many of the individuals they supervise know how to do their jobs better than them. The manager's job should be break down barriers that prevent the actual professionals from doing their jobs in addition to treating their employees like human beings rather than machines that have a run time of 8+ hours and limitless capacity for work.

Pros

A lot of great people who are wiling to lend you a hand.
Open access to internal reasources (not hard to get what you need)
Top end test equipment. (but not enough of it)
Good place to work if you like the "keep your head, down, shut up and do what your told" style of managment.

Cons

A minority of people who run the show via intimidation and humiliation.
Lack of resources, you may arrive on Monday morning to find an engineer took your o-scope.
Lack of accurate process documentation (Docs have been "Cut and Pasted" to death)
No means of bringing on new technicians besides watch and do.
Level of training received depends on who trains you.
No matter how fast you are, you are always a little slower than desired. How much slower? You'll never know, they refuse to quantify anything. It's all about the subjective perception of reality.'
One can be labeled and "pigeon hole" before you even realize that it happened.
There are some engineers that have serious communication and people skill problems, but their abusive behavior is tolerated because they a good at what they do.At most they may get a slap on the wrist. However if you confront the status quo, it will be the beginning of a down ward spiral out the door. Company grows by acquisition not internally driven innovation. An absolutely astounding ability to look directly at a problem and not see it. If we don't talk about it doesn't exist. On the other hand, an odd eagerness to "admire the kings new clothes".

Advice to Senior Management

Advice to those considering advising managment: Forget it, I tried it, doesn't work. "If it ain't broke don't fix it" is their "continuous improvement plan"

Pros

Very well equipped facility. Great benefits. Clean, well organized. Plenty of overtime.

Cons

Due to nature of products and market, company is very structured and training does not allow for any past work experience. You need to do it " their way" regardless of whether or not it makes sense from a manufacturing standpoint. Person training me had good knowledge and ability to do the work but no "people skills" and only knew what needed to be done without and knowledge of why the task was being done.

Advice to Senior Management

Please utilize people who have the ability to work with people in the training positions. Trainers need to recognize what trainee needs and help the trainee, not chastize and be-little the trainee when success is not immediately realized. People learn at different rates of speed and that must be taken into consideration.

Pros

They do have good benefits, but not enought ot make up for the low salaries

Cons

A paranoid neurotic business model that kills imagination and innovation. An entrenched "old boy & girl" network in middle management that keeps talent away from upper management inorder to protect their positions. An upper management that brags about better than expected profits and positive stock movement then tells workers "no raises, no bonuses, do more work for less, for the good of the company"

Advice to Senior Management

Come out of your offices once in a while and meet the people that do the real work for you.

Pros

Benefits are great. The work day ends by 5pm. There is limited work with China. Easy going culture if you avoid the pockets of political inspired leadership. Consistant paycheck and a good place to ride out the recession.

Cons

Very introspective. Not open to outside ideas or benchmarking. Verbal abuse is condoned and/or ignored. HR provides no support in a male driven culture. HR refused to address high rate of turn-over. HR is basically a Joke. Inflexible work mentality, no flex time, limited work from home. Unwilling to modify antiquated vacation policy. No incentive pay until 2nd year and it is not linked to performance. Yearly bonus is not linked to performance.

Advice to Senior Management

Look at the HR department and what it is not doing. There is a serious retention problem that is not being addressed. We are losing the innovative people and keeping the dead-wood. Pay is NOT competitive for the skill-sets required to drive new products to market. HR needs to be refreshed from the TOP DOWN. When employees lodge complaint, there is a preception problem and that weight on employee moral than facts.

Pros

Growing company
Known to keep expanding
Good benefits
yearly revenue is always increasing
the company is diverse and has facilities all over the world
you can transfer your employment to anywhere

Cons

unfortunately it seems the reason why Woodward has been successful is that they buy out companies and start dissecting to their advantage, sort of like a chop shop if you will.

Advice to Senior Management

If Woodward happens to buy the company you are currently working for, start looking for other employment opportunities elsewhere. But I do have to admit, if you are on the other side of the fence on the Woodward side, more power to you.

Pros

The best reasons to work at Woodward are a fairly good benefits package and relatively healthy job security. Woodward has a pretty nice health package, a bonus plan that pays out most of the time (2009's economic issues excepted), and a fair 401k match (4.5% to your 6%, and 5% WGOV stock). Additionally, this company prides itself on employees who have worked 25 years or more with the company. Woodward does do a fairly good job of trying to keep employees in bad times (Again, 2009 excluded) and in general because of the markets it is in does not have a lot of exposure to any one downturn.

I enjoy working for Woodward overall.

Cons

Woodward is neither fast past, exciting, or efficient. Mobility is fairly limited as the positions up the corporate ladder tend to remain filled for long periods, or hired outside the company. These and other attributes are par for the course for large companies, and Woodward is no exception. Woodward's largest customers are very very large, and we model ourselves much like they do in terms of engineering speed and process inefficiencies.

Additionally, every year or two the senior management has pushed forward some sort of reorganization of the management structure. The impacts are miminal except to the reporting stucture, but it is a concern that our sales structure seems to lack traction to succeed.

Woodward tends to expand by purchasing other companies rather than organic growth of its own product lines. While in general it will treat the acquisitions well, Woodward will take its time fully integrating the company and the acquired persons may never feel fully integrated.

Finally, if you are to work in the sales area, you'll find that Woodward lacks the resources to support new engineering projects more often than not. This can be frustrating when one realizes how much new business we turn away.

Advice to Senior Management

Senior Management's initiatives have greatly improved our quality and delivery issues on production side. If we can leverage those wins onto our Engineering side, Woodward can be just as agile as a smaller company.

Pros

A great company that is very well positioned for the future. Wonderful location in Colorado. Upper management seem to have a good plan for future growth. Nice year end bonus plan.

Cons

Pay is consistently below industry averages, thus there is a fair amount of 'churn' as people go elsewhere to make more money in the industry to have their pay at least trend upward instead of decreasing as cost of living outpaces raises. It amazes me how companies will keep such a tight purse when it comes to paying to attract and keep top people. They hire new people, pay a relocation package, pay a recruiter, train them for 6 months...all before they start to contribute useful effort to the company. If they would instead, distribute that $50,000 of non-value added expense to current employees, they would keep experienced people, increase moral, and be a much more productive company.

Advice to Senior Management

Decide if the Woodward pay structure attracts and keeps top people, or average performers. If you offer average pay you get average people and the cream of the crop go elsewhere.
Keep up to date with economics and adjust the 401k plan to allow choices at Vanguard that have a return higher than 0%.