The Clorox Company Employee Reviews about "bay area"

Pros

-competitive intern salary -real hands on experience - great mentors - Great co-workers -no company politics or hierarchy -managers goal is to improve your experience & knowledge not just to make money -diverse department (50% female and people from all walks of life) -Friday’s in summer are half days -company holds a lot of social event (even virtually)

Cons

-high cost of living -starting salary is 75k which is tough in Bay Area

Pros

The company culture is amazing, full of kind and talented employees who care about each other and their growth. Really inclusive and puts people first. It's a fun place to work a great company to jump start a career. The work life balance is also incredible incredible half day Fridays during the summer and a culture that recognizes the importance of mental health and taking breaks.

Cons

It can be challenging to get promoted if you don't fit the outgoing stereotype that is preferred and if you don't have a manager that sees your worth. The salaries are not as competitive as other companies which is challenging given the location in the Bay Area. For R&D employees, there is not a much room to grow up the ladder as there is on the sales and marketing side.

Pros

People, and work-life balance. Promotions are well-laid out and you can climb up the ladder if you put in the work.

Cons

Things move slowly, and they still use old outdated systems. The pay is not very competitive for a company in the Bay Area.

Pros

Great company culture, good benefits, and many opportunities for career development and growth

Cons

Low salary in comparison to Bay Area cost of living

Pros

Company culture is excellent with good work/life balance.Opportunity to work with smart and passionate people.Free clorox products.Rarely any layoffs.Summer hours for 3 months starting memorial day weekend,One Quiet day per week.

Cons

Pay is very below average by bay area standards.Not much of career growth.Some other minor issue like usage of too many acronyms ,meeting on the fly .

Pros

- strong focus on development, lots of opportunities for growth - people first mentality - great brands and high performing teams

Cons

- lot of reviews and pre-reviews prior to finalizing presentations and materials - slow to invest in technology - pay is stable but takes a few years to be apt for the bay area

Pros

People Culture Bring your actual whole self to work Learning and development Opportunity Mission driven work Open and diverse

Cons

Indecisive Matrices Slow to innovate Long time in roles and slower to promotion as you become more senior Less work life balance during pandemic Low total comp for the bay area

Pros

1) team first supportive culture 2) good work life balance 3) half day Friday's in the summer

Cons

1) underpaid for the Bay Area 2) limited vacation 3) incentives not tied to performance (incentive payout does not reflect performance rating) 4) slow to change 5) antiquated systems, leadership not willing to invest in technology/system upgrades needed 6) strong performance not rewarded

Pros

I think Clorox is a great place to work if you want to be able to have a successful career in R&D with just a bachelors degree. I believe that there is a strong focus on employee development at Clorox. There are opportunities for changing technical focus and rotating between different groups, which encourages cross-department flow of ideas. I think there is significant collaboration and interaction of R&D with other functions and that R&D is thus less insulated from the business than at some other companies. Work-life balance (at least for me) is the best I have seen anywhere. A significant number of scientists appear to have time for a real lunch break, are able to get enough work done while logging 8-9 hours per work day, and are often able to avoid scheduling meetings before 8:30am or after 4:30pm (unless collaborating with people in other time zones). Between Memorial Day and Labor Day the company observes “half-day Fridays” where employees get most of the afternoon off. The company appears to embrace diverse working styles and appears to encourage employees to “be themselves” both personally and professionally. Many R&D employees take Myers-Briggs Type Indicator tests and use the results as a guide to interpret their own and each others’ working styles, but I don’t think Clorox demonstrates an obvious preference for any one Myers-Briggs type. I think Clorox employees are friendly, professional, and caring. The Pleasanton campus is beautiful. I think the culture is collaborative and people appear to enthusiastically celebrate each other’s successes. Clorox seems to care very much about the emotional well-being of its employees. I think there are good mechanisms in place for peer-to-peer recognition and feedback.

Cons

I don’t think Clorox is a good place for people with PhDs, or people with extensive non-CPG experience. I suspect that many PhDs and non-CPG experienced hires who come to Clorox do so because they are seeking things like work-life balance and friendly coworkers, not the opportunity to capitalize on their skillset. I don’t think most Clorox research is technically challenging enough to warrant having a PhD, so if you have a PhD and you come to Clorox you could end up feeling like your degree was a waste of time. I feel that even in R&D, non-technical skills are more valued than technical skills. There is a dearth of PhDs at Clorox compared to other companies I have worked for that invest significantly in R&D, and I have not personally seen any Clorox R&D job listings that require a PhD (if such jobs exist, I am not yet aware of them). It also seems like people hired right after completing their bachelor’s degree get promoted more quickly on average than employees hired in with PhDs or non-CPG experience. If you have a PhD there is a very decent chance your manager will not. This is not a problem in and of itself, but in my personal experience I believe it has led to my skillset and contributions not being noticed or understood. For quite awhile I felt like it was presumed I didn’t understand basic scientific concepts any better than a newly minted bachelors degree grad. Over and over I was walked through exactly how to plan out what to me was basically a high school level science experiment, by people less educated and less experienced than me. I found this treatment very demeaning and I never had this experience at jobs where everyone else had a PhD. I have taken the initiative to start new technical projects at Clorox, only to be told by my manager at the time (who didn’t have a PhD) that I was not demonstrating creativity or leadership. Being told exactly what to do all the time stifled the ingenuity and independent thinking I cultivated during my PhD and got me thinking inside of the Clorox box, so I’m not surprised at all that I don’t seem creative in this environment. I have never had any of the above problems at other companies I have worked at where the people up the chain from me also had PhDs. Experiences like this have made my job very emotionally exhausting at times. I think that PhDs and many non-CPG experienced hires are offered lower level starting positions than they would be offered at other companies. For example, I personally had multiple other offers from other companies besides Clorox at the time I was deciding on my Clorox offer. The position Clorox offered me was the least senior and lowest compensated. (I accepted the offer anyway and have stuck around through the years because of the positive aspects listed in the other part of this review.) I believe R&D documentation is very poor and needs significant improvement. I suspect the root cause of this problem is that a critical percentage of R&D employees lack advanced degrees and have limited formal training and experience in technical and scientific writing. I think that tribal knowledge and word of mouth factor too much in passing down historical information, and that the “wheel” is often reinvented as a result. I don’t think it is good for any company to have poor documentation practices because good documentation is the foundation for institutional memory. I also think rotations of employees between different parts of Clorox are too frequent, compromising institutional memory further. I think that there is strong similarity bias in hiring, and that this bias has compromised intellectual diversity among employees. I think Clorox focuses recruiting efforts too much on a small number of random schools, alumni from which are already overrepresented in the company. Compared to other places I have worked, I think hiring is poorly diversified in terms of the number of universities that new hires come from. I noticed that other reviewers and some of my coworkers say that compensation at Clorox is low for the Bay Area. If you consider the salary and stock benefits alone, this does appear to be true at first glance. For example, I had other Bay Area offers that had significantly higher base pay plus RSUs. However, my compensation level at Clorox makes more sense to me when considering the fact that my job doesn’t require a PhD and my work-life balance is excellent. Also, I don’t think CPG tends to be a highly lucrative industry in general, regardless of location. Finally, Pleasanton/Dublin/Livermore are far cheaper to live in than Silicon Valley and the Peninsula where many high paying Bay Area jobs are concentrated (SF, Mountain View, Palo Alto, Menlo Park, Cupertino, Sunnyvale, etc.). So maybe the low compensation at Clorox is just the job market working properly.

Pros

Work Life Balance and great people to work with.

Cons

Lower Compensation than typical for Bay Area.