Do you think there's a way to fix Honeywell or are we beyond the saving point? I'm not talking about whether the company will survive or not, we all know it will - those on top will make sure they have a cow to milk for a long time to come. What I'm talking about is can this once again become a good place to work that respects its employees and treats them as an asset? What could be done to get there again?
25 replies (most recent on top)
TEE HEE HEEE! @sfl+1a09I7s2 said to invest in RDE, we were told yesterday 3/26, around noon, NO RDE work starting Saturday 3/27 until next Sunday! They gave a list of things you could do including use vacation if you can't find work.
Ok, not earlier in the week so you could plan and look around, or make plans with family, Yesterday around noon!
Good Job David! you will do just fine!
Post ID: @2nzk+1a09I7s2- Well said and spot on! Those of us that began in the 70's/80's have seen a dramatic shift to treat employees as a resource, an FTE or a number. Nothing more. Something to get the maximum amount of work out off while keeping the expense as low as possible. Yeah, yeah yeah, if this were your company you would do the same..... People are sick of hearing that rant. It's BS to assume everyone is as greedy and careless with employee and customer value.
Last but not least- The change to the legacy retirement plan was criminal. Change made with little notice- Ask people how much that impacted a 10, 20 and 30 year retirement. That's the criminal part, they robbed employees of millions. Instead of a 3 to 5 year phase in like Lockheed, Boeing etc which allows employees to plan for these changes and minimize the impact, they ripped the band aid off in 2015. Somebody had to finance Cote Island.
Those that selected the lump sum or newer employees will roll their eyes at all this. Remember these robbed employees developed the products, delivered the hardware and won over new customers that fed the profit machine all these years.
I can't wait to leave this horrible place and collect my pension for 50 years!
@2nbl
My upbringing was almost the same. I don't know how many were in your family but I'm from a single parent home with 7 other siblings. My Grandfather worked 2 full time jobs for over 40 years. My mother almost the same and every one of my siblings and I started earning money for the family before our double digits! We learned the value of hard work. We ALL dedicated our whole selves to our individual jobs. Myself, I gave Honeywell ALL that I had! 76 hour weeks, holidays, going in to work when I felt half dead at times, and had to be carried out of Honeywell from all the stress and pressure from the job. My efforts, for the most part, went unnoticed. The more I did, the more was expected. The more I made it happen, the more they wanted. And when I got to the point where I my body just couldn't take it anymore and I had to leave, they were like "your job was being closed out anyway". The people here are not at fault! IT IS HONEYHELL that made the people feel this way. Oh, and yes, the whole KIT KAT scenario, is a THING
No. Everyone in my group hates Honeywell. We stay for the paycheck and occasionally feel motivated to look for other jobs when the id–ts above us twist the screws a littler more into our thumbs as they hang us from the ceiling. Then we get used to the extra hours, the bizarre requests for carrying pet projects with no value added, the expectation that we’ll jump at every whim and quite frankly I’m at the point where I’m a dead man walking. I’m not doing my job anymore, I’m collecting a paycheck until I can find something else. My full time job is finding something else.
@2nbl aka 39: First of all, thank you for your service.
That having been said, it is of interest to note that your upbringing was not so dissimilar to mine, except that you chose the military as a path to better your life, and I busted my @$$ in school to get college scholarships to better mine. If your moniker of “39” is your age, you are an early millennial whereas I am a boomer.
Many parents of boomers who lived (and suffered) through the Great Depression and WWII (my father and FIL served on the front lines) developed a “poverty mentality” that kept them emotionally tied to their lean years and hesitant to expect more for themselves, and got used to having their limits set by others who had more power. Some overcame this way of thinking before they passed it on to their children; others did not. Some boomers, like myself and the senior colleagues you disparage, overcame those self-limiting notions over time as we found ourselves able to thrive in a more stabilized and growth-oriented economy.
In the ‘70s, ‘80s, and early ‘90s it was the norm for corporations to offer solid benefits packages to professional-level staff that would ensure that their employees could come to work with a sense of financial security about the present and future, and could thus focus on their work. These packages that the “old folks” lament losing were THE NORM of the day, as were offices with doors and windows for every engineer, accountant, and draftsman. Wealth was distributed more equitably between those in the C-suite and the ones who actually generated corporate earnings.
Some of your colleagues have over a million dollars in their pension funds or 401ks that they will need to live on for the next 30+ years, and you need to understand that they cannot just walk away from that. They are being held hostage by a company – a soulless, Wall Street worshiping entity - that rewards only the vivisectionists at the top and is nothing like the one that welcomed them 30 years ago. They have every right to mourn their material and emotional losses as the leadership nickels and dimes them out of raises, MIPs, matching benefits, healthcare deductibles…and adds back irrelevancies like tutoring for kids they don’t have, and industry-standard maternity leave.
The changes over the years can be likened to a feudal system where the local lord decides he likes cheese and suddenly demands that henceforth all his vassals need to donate X% of the milk from their cows to the lord for his cheesy pleasure. And taxes need to be raised by X% to fund the fromagerie. That’s taxation without representation, which has led to more than one peasant uprising. The difference here is that your colleagues are not peasants, nor are they the mutinous sort. They are, for the most part, good people and honest contributors who have been increasingly mistreated and disrespected over time. So now the leadership tactic is to PIP them and make their daily lives so miserable with understaffing, underfunding, and laughable deadlines that they will quit and leave their millions in the company’s coffers, which inevitably will make its way back to the C-suite.
Coming back around to you, if you hear these folks complaining, know that they have a genuine basis for doing so just walk away from such conversations if you can. If 39 is your age, you have no idea what a 59-year-old consistently Block 2 employee is going through at HW these days, so STFU! Do you have access to the actual productivity measures of those you accuse of being slack? While you think your work ethic is so superior, it seems to me that you are so comfortable with lack and poor treatment by the upper ranks that you deserve to be taken advantage of. The C-suite LOVES people like you, who will say “Yes Sir, may I have another” and rise up to take on more after each beating, determined to do better than their colleagues who are professedly d@mn3d sick of it.
Loyalty is actually a bad word. If you are loyal to the feudal lord, he can lie to you, steal from you, starve you, d0 your wife, conscript your children…and you will still go into battle for his glory. Think about it and understand that your colleagues have already suffered enough and have overcome the chains of loyalty. The last chain is that pension…which they have earned.
@1hkk
You have no idea. I am a middle-aged military veteran of well over a decade. I not only learned work ethic from my single mother, whom had to work 2-3 jobs just to keep us fed, sheltered and clothed, but also from my grandfather, whom gave everything to his job, when he was at work, so that he could better enjoy the time he had with his family. The employment perks you lost over time are meaningless to someone that has sacrificed and lost so much more in their personal life like I have. YOU are the ones that think they deserve participation trophies just for showing up to work. Just showing up doesn't matter. Showing up, and dedicating yourself to putting out the best product YOU can put out is what matters.
Here, again, demonstrates how your type will do less than standard, and when you don't get what you think you are owed, you want to blame the company, and not your work (and Personal) ethics.
Your nonsense is the exact reason why Honeywell will never recover its once coveted spot at the top of the heap. Your 19th Century attitude is the reason why Honeywell won't survive the 21st century.
This is a deep thread, with many facets. I will give my opinion on AERO procurement. Why is leadership not asking why we lose people daily? WHY? Until we hold people accountable and level work load, this supply chain will fail. There are so many knowledgeable people that never get heard. Leadership is in a constant search for a magic fix, that is not there. Listen to our resources who know our operating system. They are resources we should use, but continuously get dismissed. Simply my lowly opinion of a start to make things better. Peace.
Fix what? All good. If you believe that, I have a cactus to sell u here in DV. LOL.
Leave, go, who cares
I can only speak for engines/apu.
APU has a huge customer base and revenue stream when things get flying again. The product lines honestly don't have any advanced technology in them. The business can go on an on for many years.
Engines: the company doesn't have the IP to compete directly with anyone. Also, the silos of knowledge has forced the company to stick with outdated software tools and processes. There is no pipeline of young/mid career engineers with experience from other companies. In my opinion, the best thing for engines is to be sold off much like Allison Engines was to Rolls.
@1fqd: Wrong! You are obviously an overconfident early career brat who has never worked anywhere else besides an ice cream stand. Your Boomer parents couldn't have given you your cushy, overindulged, "everybody gets a trophy" upbringing without the compensation package the senior folks here lament having lost.
Having something, then having it taken away from you without replacement compensation is a loss, like lost cellphone or video game privileges for your generation, which I'm sure you reeled against at the time.
Understand that you've "never been anywhere", and if you make HW your long-term home, you will leave undertrained, undercompensated, and under-aware of the business world. And don't think that dumping on your elders will get you to the DA inner circle...they always fill those spots from the outside.
Best way to fix HW, is to cut away the dead weight. All of you lazy old timers that would rather b–ch about what you think the company has done to you, than actually do your job, have got to go.
cant fix stupid
TROLL!!!!! But if you don't know how to get yourselves out of this wretched mess, I guess asking incognito on this site is better than the wretched way you're handling things now.
The future is what we make it!
I wouldn't be too confident that it will survive either. What does survive mean? Less than half the value of it's former stock? 40% like GE?
Change the CEO. Change happens at the top.
Simple answer: NO!
Berkshire Hathaway used to be a textile company. IBM used to be a computer company. Many large corporations want to be Berkshire Hathaway, not Honeywell. Tear into labor costs, sell everything and buyback stock and then hopefully make great investment with the cash and become mega wealthy off it. You would need a CEO that likes to make airplane parts and all the other products Honeywell makes. Not likely.
They don't need to fix it. It has been known that Honeywell cannot keep good people in the PMT plant for a long time. The plant is next to BASF, DuPont and all other chemical company. Honeywell always has lowest salary and worst benefit but not everyone can get into BASF or DuPont right out from school so they took a job with Honeywell for couple of years and then move to next door for better paying career. Honeywell can always find new people who don't know about Honeywell, no job experience or cannot find a job somewhere else. So why would Honeywell fix it.
It is FUBAR
Employees are a distant third of concern behind stockholders and (grudgingly) customers.
Employees are an expense and cutting expenses are a top priority to appease stockholders.
Forcing employees to be stockholders by dispensing 401k matching funds as honeywell stock is cute, but any employee who owns substantial stock in the company they get their primary paycheck from is headed for personal financial disaster.
The answer is no and will always be no. Managers are commenters, not doers. They believe in less doers. We are in “investment” mode I.e. squeeze the operational expenses down and drive up margins.
Only way to change Honeywell is to sell it in tiny pieces and it’ll recover if you’re part of the spin off.
They would never do it but if they wanted to:
Issue some form of retention bonuses to all inner elbows that vests over 24 months
Increase headcount 10-15% in high cost regions (ie US)
Target new products for new markets, real innovation
Expand capital investments and RDE budgets significantly (25-50%) to replace aging infrastructure and enable organic growth in new markets
Offer high performing suppliers better terms
All of this would have temporary downside to the metrics and perhaps the stock price and that can never be tolerated. So Yes it can be saved, but no it won't be.
First, you would have to find someone on the ELT who would WANT to fix it. More money for them if they don't. Check out a thread that appeared here several weeks ago titled "The Dark Triad" to see why treating employees well is not an interest for the current ELT. The only way for that to change is to clear them all out and replace them with humble leaders who are interested in creating excellent products and do not pander to Wall Street.