Poor Management and Politics Causes Lack of Collaboration and Does Not Support Innovation - Business Analyst Dematic Employee Review

Management does not listen to experts they hire; they value their own opinion over facts to make decisions especially when they have a poor understanding of the topic. There seems to be a great deal of politics and the intent, direction and strategy is often kept very secret although the information is necessary for employees to complete their job. Employees must walk on eggshells in order to not accidentally encroach on these political topics which seem rather silly and greatly reduces collaboration across teams and innovation. There is a great deal of preferential treatment for the Canadian office and employees hired through there. Grand Rapids based employees are not afforded the same upward mobility or treatment as the Canadian employees and the company will hire talent specifically from Canada in lieu of local talent for distributed teams and/or move entire fields of responsibility to the Canadian office. This is likely due to cost vs intrinsic value to the company or skills. Employees' talents are greatly underutilized which often leads to boredom, performing mundane tasks or tasks which have nothing to do with the employees' expertise or reason for hire. Dematic has lost many very intelligent and technically diversified employees because of this and continues to lose them rather consistently. Unless you are a junior programmer who just needs some experience for the job market, Dematic is probably not the place you will grow your unique skills; on the contrary, you will likely begin to lose them since they likely will not be used. You will be told you have to work overtime because you are an "exempt" employee although the tasks performed do not fall under exempt law; employees must work 50 hours per week without additional compensation. Dematic Executives have created values and goals consistent with innovation and continuing to evolve Dematic's knowledge/expertise/products through new processes; in practice, this does not happen as management relies on the "it's how we've always done it" mentality. The direction and practice of management is in direct opposition to what the Executives state in this respect. Complaints about combative management and poor working environments will be ignored and left unaddressed. Outside of a laptop, employees are generally not provided with the necessary tools in order to do their job (i.e. keyboards, head-sets, software etc.). Management will say “I don’t know where to get that” and effectively leave the employee to their own devices. Dematic says it is “Agile”, but in practice, they simply use Waterfall methodologies and utilize software generally associated with Agile (i.e. Jira). Employees are expected to take ownership of poor management estimates, direction and job decisions despite employees voicing concern; jobs are often in an overrun status which management responds to with mandatory overtime which is not compensated for. The financial structure of Dematic inhibits the employees' ability to go above and beyond in their job functions. Those employees who must charge to projects and have unique skills are not afforded R&D hours to perform research which would benefit the company as a whole. This financial structure leads to silos within the organization between project based and R&D employees effectively creating barriers to innovation and collaboration.