Work-life balance is nonexistent. You will be required to work long hours and will not be allowed to take a short day to recharge after long strenuous bouts of work. If you asked for PTO you're questioned on why you're taking it and if you can take it some other time. PTO is accrued and HR stated there was a policy to "borrow" PTO so that for longer vacations that employees may not have accrued enough hours, employees will still be paid. I tried doing this once and the response was "it's too hard to do that on the system" even though other colleagues had just successfully requested the same thing days before me. Upper management is easily startled by the demands of the parent company and often lashes out at their direct reports when things out of their control do not go according to plan. Tasks and priorities are often switched up due to poor planning, lack of resource management, and probably changing demands from HQ. There is an expectation to complete tasks with atrociously short deadlines without factoring in major components like supply chain or staff availability. There is micromanagement over very small mundane tasks but the large ongoing projects are left with little support. You will often hear "let me know how I can support you or give you resources", but the minute you ask for them you will get immense pushback and even criticism of your work ethic. During my time there I was not comfortable asking my direct manager for clarification on things because she would often be in her obscenely bad moods that would be inflicted on the lab or she would just try gaslighting me into thinking she did give me that information. The CEO was also extremely rude and disrespectful. I have heard him talk bad about women, make fat jokes to a heavier-set employee, and be super untrusting of an African American vendor. I have never seen a company where the CEO is extremely disliked and a source of low morale. Responsibilities are given at management's whim and not properly planned out which has caused too many lapses in communication and improper use of resources which again can be attributed to upper management having little to no experience in running a proper lab. There were so many times when I was blindly doing a project for a few days just to find out there was at least one other person assigned to this as well. Talk about wasteful! There has been great emphasis on safety walks where the employees are berated for having a clean single tube on the floor but there is no addressing the lack of a properly functioning safety shower. There were so many useless logs that had to be filled out because the CEO thought it would look professional when instead he should have thought about- is this truly needed? is there a risk in not having this log? Is it practical for the current situation the lab is in? Is there a compliance reason to need this? Do we have the appropriate amount of resources to ensure the binders are being checked, filled out, and stored? Many things in the lab were like this..... If you do not speak mandarin it will be hard to move up in the company, they will deny it but there is a strong preference for these types of folks and you will often see favoritism for those employees. These mandarin speaking employees are often the ones watching other employees and reporting back that you checked on your cellphone while at your desk.
