Oak Ridge National Laboratory Reviews

Senior management has almost ruined ORNL. Nothing is as it seems on the surface. There is no opportunity for advancement based on hard work, putting in extra effort, bringing in money, etc; it is purely political. There is no opportunity to express concerns or opinions without retaliation. Forced diversity has resulted in hiring many new people with sub-par qualifications at highly inflated salaries; this has caused much discouragement among existing staff. Morale overall is extremely low for those who have worked at ORNL more than 5 years. Once you are there long enough to see through the facade, the corruption is almost more than you can stomach each day. Every few years we take a 3rd party survey on company climate, culture, etc; no corrective actions are ever taken, and rather, things always get worse. We have "appearance" of safety, but true safety is not valued. I can't think of one person in the last 10 years who has happily retired; those who make it long enough to retire are cynical, frustrated, and often want to leave with no retirement party or acknowledgement...because the fake smiles and empty words would just pour salt in wounds. Unless there is a complete turnover of upper and mid-level management, I could not recommend working here. And that's a shame.

Take a good look at the negative reviews here on glassdoor (especially those by people who have been at the lab for a while) and know that if you are in any sort of leadership role (project lead/group lead or higher), you will be dealing with those issues on a daily basis, and even if you are not in a leadership role, those issues will randomly cause chaos in your day-to-day work like stray bullets. ORNL has steadily become more and more toxic since the new senior leadership took over in 2018. It wasn't always like this. The current senior leadership is more interested in personal glory and building legacy than actually creating an environment conducive to research, and that's the culture/attitude that's rewarded at the lab. Lab-wide decisions are made by senior leadership on a whim, and whenever things go poorly, blame is placed on the researchers. Most if not all of the changes made by senior leadership have made it more difficult to conduct meaningful research effectively on a day-to-day basis -- things like arbitrary lab-wide restructuring of every group where people had to reapply for their own jobs, removal of 20% free time for postdocs to pursue their own research and using that money to fund more meaningless middle management roles, a ban on hiring anyone graduating from University of Tennessee (that was later rescinded after senior leadership insisted that everyone had misinterpreted their directions), and many countless more lab-wide one-size-fits-all policies that feel like death by a thousand cuts. By the time I left, I never felt so unsupported in my research and never had so little work life balance in my life.