Novartis Employee Reviews about "no work life"

Pros

Great benefits good salary nice cafe

Cons

Pressure on your day to day and work life balance

Pros

Entry base pay is appropriate and relative to experience. Small rotation program available to learn about and to contribute across line functions. Good collaborative cross-functional communication can exist if you try hard as a team. Interacting with some of the most passionate people I have meet across the industry who know their science and care about the patient. Strong pipeline.

Cons

Low bonus pay and and no stock options for most worker-bee levels in the company computers to other pharma. Strategies for work life balance are implemented in very different ways depending on your direct line management- when they are flexible, they are super flexible. But for those with face-time needing managers, the flexibility does not exist. I've worked for both extremes of the spectrum. Too many micromanaging middle managers- influences productivity, morale, deliverables and overall team efficiency. Developing your direct reports is not valued. It is great that you work hard to go to bat for others and your direct reports and push hard to support their growth, but it is demoralizing when the next level up does little to support development or praise our level's work or development. Commitment to 'diversity' contributes to keeping toxic coworkers thus affecting people and projects negatively. Antiquated review and rating system where a lot can get missed and managers can take a few words out of context from a multirater and greaty distort the intent of the contents due to their lack of understanding of a person's contribution to the overall project and their lack of understanding of a role's interaction with other line functions. Some do a disservice to staff by applying a broad stroke to reviews and compare tasks done by all people in a role. We need more adept managers who understand the different cycles of projects and can appreciate the value of contributions in the short and long term. It is very demotivating when management in other departments acknowledges and praises you and your colleagues, but your direct management routinely does the exact opposite. Disruptive innovation is not embraced or understood by all management. It is not an issue anymore for our family, but did employees are still waiting for the child care center. However they did already build another fitness center, outdoor basketball court, etc. A lot of outsourcing of fundamental tasks supportive of the clinical development business.

Pros

Large company so it has great benefits but hard time with work/life balance. That is up to you.

Cons

Large company work life balance is hard if you can't do it for yourself.

Pros

Salary and benefits at more senior levels. Opportunities for growth. Balanced work/development structure. Fairly good communication and standard work for a company this large.

Cons

Can be complicated to understand how to get exposure to leadership Can get overworked if you don't understand how to establish expectations on work life balance.

Pros

Nice people; Company engaged in the most advanced field in oncology drug development

Cons

there is no work/life balance;1 person's workload= 5 in other companies; people constantly quit

Pros

One will get to learn a lot in terms of deliverable. A very good platform they provide for learning. Immense opportunities for learning. Salary and other benefits on time.

Cons

Now this list is endless.Extreme level of nasty and dirty politics. Work culture is toxic beyond imagination. Team leads glorify and normalize the concept of stretching which leads to screwed up work life balance. Team leads can stoop to any level to bring down someone, demean, mentally harass, threaten and blackmail the associates till they leave. Newly appointed team lead does not have any bare minimum basic mannerism of how to talk to people and can go to the extent of using cuss words even. Really wondering what kind of bizarre environment do they want to create at work place and even more so what qualities did the organization of such a repute see to hire and retain such team leads for last 8-9 years whereas people with quality and talent are not being retained (reason for recent high attrition at Novartis Hyderabad). A big question towards the attitude of management. Novartis has this so called SPEAKUP culture which is a total farce at least in Hyderabad. Do NOT FALL FOR THIS TRAP. Extreme level of regionalism being practiced. No matter how well you do, now matter how many accolades you accumulate from stakeholders nothing matters. Only bootlickers, sycophants, friends and Maharashtrians will be recognized and promoted. Do not think that if you are facing issues of harassment and non-sense from your manager the leadership will come to your support. Rather the leadership team along with your manger and hrbp will lay a trap for you. So beware. Horrible HR. Few uncivilized ill-mannered people from Odhisha who are half baked in terms of knowledge also are being given responsible position only to sabotage team unfortunately. Such is the level of their insecurity that they start practicing divide and rule within team, which is something that a well educated capable person with some dignity and integrity cannot take;but alas Novartis Hyderabad management and leadership team does not believe in promoting such people and giving them responsible position.

Pros

- Reputable name in the industry - Decent pay and benefits - Job rotation and training opportunities

Cons

- Race/nationality bias: Advantage if you are of certain race/nationality. You just get more opportunities. Pretty disconcerting to hear certain HR make blatant comments biased towards own nationality. - Identification of 'talents' questionable. If you cant perform on the job but are good with your mouth and putting on a show, this might just be the place where you thrive. - Work/life balance out of the question (though dependent on department and how accountable you want to be) - No Job mastery due to excessive job rotation/rotations which were not thought through. Some folks who have been rotated are placed in roles beyond their capabilities but are just smoking through. - Some processes/systems are very inefficient, resistance to change with 'this is how it's always been done' mentality. Some decision makers have the 'i'm not sure what is adequate so let's just do everything to play safe' mindset. These add on unnecessarily to an already high workload. - Weak managers: Some weak placements through lower/middle/senior mgmt roles. Ability to lead and serve as good role models questionable, resulting in low morale/people leaving. - Plenty of good people left/looking to leave. Yet, many who are not doing their jobs are staying put and even identified as talents. - Some employees are very rude, arrogant and disrespectful to people deemed 'beneath' them, because they feel invincible having the backing of mgmt to be groomed into future leaders of the organisation. However, they become very nice to the people 'beneath' them when the right people (aka middle/seniormgmt)are around. This creates alot of distrust and dampens employee morale. After all, why bother being a good employee when these are the type of people that mgmt seems to appreciate? And is it a good idea to stay put when these people are going to be the future leaders? This used to be a better place but not anymore. Unless there is a major cultural shake-up, you will not want to be working here.

Pros

Pay and benefits are industry average .. good ground to network and best of class in some areas

Cons

Glass ceiling and career path discussed with your manager is just a paper Sr mgmt is bunch of bullies (alpha dogs) and that is a reflection of the rest of the food chain .. long working hours and no understanding of work life balance very negative culture .. and focused on CHF, and more CHFand more $$$$$ .. job cuts announced to the public if it happens in the US .. other places are done quietly they have a marketing term for job cuts, they call it increasing novartis productivity ... they are moving the jobs to INDIA .. that is all. They will bring it back in 2015 when they realize that such model will not work.

Pros

Lots of learnings and development opportunities. Good compensation.

Cons

Work life balance is not the best although the company is trying to support it with different initiatives

Pros

Salary and benefits were great.

Cons

Poor work life balance and you get lost in the numbers because the company is sooo large.