Used to be Great - Information Technology Eastman Employee Review

While the salary is fine, you are feeling the strain more and more these days as prices all around go up and the cost of living raises feel smaller and smaller. The pay is fine for a 40 hour work week - assuming that is what you end up doing. A lot of the folks in our area are Exempt employees and generally end up doing more rather than less week to week. People have to be on call to fix things that break in the middle of the night or need to be online early in order to have meetings with folks across the world. All of that is fine when you're treated fairly and people understand and let you flex that work from home. A new policy will be coming out soon in November that seems like it has only come from the CEO, where they will require all work to be done from the office and anything outside of the office will basically just be ignored, even if management still consider such things critical. Worked a few hours late into Wednesday fixing something that broke? Too bad! Used to be management would be happy to let you come in late, or leave a few hours early, or just generally work from home the following day. After this new policy you'll be marked as delinquent if you're not in your seat in the office for the full 8-5 the next day, and if you have to work late on Thursday as well? That's just the job. The options for parents are going to be severely reduced as well - it was asked if someone could go pick their kid up around 3 and finish out their workday from home. The answer was a resounding no - that would not be compliant anymore. That person is only one of a ton of other working parents at Eastman, some of them are working parents who BOTH work for Eastman. What are those parents going to do now? A lot of folks at Eastman work in either Bristol or Johnson City, you're actually getting less work out of them by trying to make them follow those sorts of constraints. That was an option even before COVID for most folks and you've just taken that away. We are constantly asked for our feedback in the "Pulse" Employee surveys. I fully believe they read through them as they bring up constant talking points from those surveys, but I have yet to see anything concrete or useful come out of them. I'm tired of being asked to take a survey that the Leadership is obviously not interested in digging into the results. The last one didn't even allow you to leave a basic comment...so obviously they don't care. Results and performance reviews have started within the last few years to be on these strange bell curves. The problem is you are sometimes comparing teams who have gotten different amounts of work or different priorities of work to each other. Some teams - due to the focus by management - are in the high level projects because they have the data expertise for that year. The other teams are still doing their work and performing based on what they are given, but when managers have to review them, they are compared to each other...and the team/employees that wasn't given those higher priority projects are told "well, you need to improve in order to be on the same level as others". Even if you finished every project that came your way and your product owners are thrilled with the outcomes - you will be told you did not succeed for that year. Projects can also be cancelled for any random reason, irrelevant of the quality of your work, perhaps leadership decided to focus on something else, or you've been directed to work on something that it turned out no one wanted. In either case - that's a project you're not finishing for the year and it'll be marked against you, not the people who assigned it to you or who decided it was no longer necessary. One of the bigger issues I have currently is the CEO, they frequently talk about cost savings and we've had constant cost-cutting for the last few years, everyone is on the edge of their seat, yet executives are still getting bonus after bonus and there is wasteful spending everywhere. The CEO flies to Florida constantly on the company jet because he doesn't live in our city or any of the outlying ones. It sure doesn't feel like you practice what you preach.