What is working from home like at Milwaukee Tool?

I like the culture, people are very helpful, supportive and approachable. Lots of trainings and overall growth, Other perks include socials, subsidized cafeteria, gym on campus & after work events (sports, etc)

Don't get sick days, work from home depends on team, don't get a lot of PTO, relatively underpaid, promotions are mostly time based and can take long sometimes

Full package benefits with a vehicle (can be used on and off work hours), provides a work phone and laptop, making my own schedule, paid for internet and other business expenses, overall travel was paid for (flights, tolls, gas, etc), an amazing team support, and being able to work from home from time to time.

Very high expectations, no work life balance, depending on your territory there is no work life balance, very demanding, managers play favorites, very long days, and no real structure in training.

Agency to learn quickly and take initiative over an entire project

OPE NPD has had a re-org every year since its inception. Do not expect to know who your manager will be in 12 months time. Do not expect to know what project you will be pulled onto within the next two weeks, but be expected to have a plan for your project for three months out and be able to update it daily. Half to 2/3rds of projects started never make it to launch. Marketing can ask engineering for patently unrealistic new product requirements, the engineers can identify the requirements that are unrealistic and provide a more realistic estimate, marketing can say that isn't acceptable, the directors will shrug, and the project team will proceed to spin its wheels for six months making unacceptable prototypes before the directors realize the engineering team might have known something about the company's present tech capability and cancel the project. All directors-on-up have an ME/business background, and continually underestimate the time required to design and validate an EE design. Projects are continually shuffled around, "catch on fire" (i.e. the design team runs into unknown unknowns which the schedule is not designed to accommodate, see previous sentence) requiring long hours and/or other EE heads to be pulled in. There is no long-term BU strategy given the constant management reorgs, save an arguably weaponized use of "agility" combined with the expectation to provide 110% effort on everything no matter how unlikely it is to have any meaningful effect. Milwaukee has "only increased revenues by $1B last year" which is used as an excuse to cut costs and apply more pressure to engineering staff (???). There are now random teams messages being sent out to EE's across the BU who are expected to respond with where they are and what they are working on at the drop of a hat. Work from home and flexible hours have been rescinded. Overdue promotions are paused for many. There used to be flexible working hours as long as you got your work done, micromanagement only happened during active firefighting, and hard work was rewarded by prompt promotions once a person was able to demonstrate they earned it. I am sorry to say that is no longer the case. My best guess is they are trying to reduce headcount. There is no way this is a sustainable way to run a business. I do not recommend working in this part of the company. EEs are the critical path on all projects, all the time. Pressure is immense and constant chaos is incompatible with long term job satisfaction. Even in this market, look for a better job somewhere else.

Allowed to work from home during the pandemic

Not very clear on training

Good discount on tools that was higher than most employee discounts; that said, I'm not sure if it's as good as it was when I was there.

I worked at Milwaukee Tool for five years. During that time, I had heard, multiple times, about how Milwaukee Tool has transformed itself from a “power tool company” to a “innovation company” and other variants. I actually heard leaders in the company say things like, “We’re no longer competing with DeWalt,” et al, “for talent; we’re competing with Apple, Amazon, Facebook,” etc., trying to suggest that the company is competing with big tech for talent. It sounds like a compelling thing to say in an all-hands in order to inspire “LFG” sales energy without too much follow-up. But in reality, compensation is only competitive regionally (and stagnates once you’ve already been hired); it is NOT competitive with the compensation packages offered by the big tech companies they are supposedly competing against by their own admission. I wouldn’t expect it to be, either. But, where they COULD be competitive – e.g., offering more work/life balance, offering remote work accommodations where these big tech companies refuse to – they fail to “innovate.” They by and large want their employees in the office 5 days a week, and leaders insist, without data to support it, that it “improves collaboration,” when folks who show up to the office end up being on Teams meetings next to their coworkers that were forced to commute (in some cases, forced to sell houses that were purchased in the pandemic era and afterwards before RTO mandates were forced). High-performing remote teams are held to the same standard. In fact, I know of one team that was absorbed by a larger department and forced to return to the office (their previous leadership’s decision to let them stay remote completely disregarded and undermined); that entire team left within a year of getting the mandate. So yea, “LFG – winning!” As an aside, also, I thought I’d share that I once heard a brand leader literally say: “we drink the koolaid here,” trying to laugh off the cult-like “culture” they’ve contrived into existence and continue to perpetuate. Gross.