Incredibly disorganized, overworked, and so very under resourced. These words describe the company I've worked for over the past 6 years.
The company is run like it's 1974. They will approve funding for a big improvement project and then make the project managers prove to them that they need all the money they were promised on a recurring basis. Implementation of a change is incredibly inefficient because of mandatory global assessments from some other Baxter facility that likes to dump on the other sites (despite being in another country).
The stock price has been falling hard (from more than 90$ in 2020 to less than 40$ in 2024) because they made some very foolish acquisitions and spinoffs in the past 2-3 years. And yet, for some reason, everyone is afraid to say anything to the CEO about his failures.
Perhaps one of the worst aspects is the constant "help" from corporate VIPs, who will come to visit for photo ops, get the red-carpet treatment and stay in Asheville for a few days at the company's expense. I often wonder if they know/care that these visits can cost local people >100 manhours to prepare for/facilitate. People stand around with their hands behind their backs while they're here then have to run around like mad trying to make up for the lost time after they leave.
Another frustration: We hold a yearly "best place to work" survey (mostly multiple choice) but limit people to only one negative thing to talk about and require our employees to complete it. If you're going to restrict negative feedback, why bother to have it! What we need is some genuine vulnerability; it would go a long way if we sat down with high level people, were granted immunity to talk about whatever we wanted, and then held some real and honest discussions about the things that need to change. The current BPTW survey is so out of touch with the boots on the ground, and we're fooling ourselves in so many ways on this.
We are failing our people on training. Other companies in industry train their people for months before sending them into production; we don't even give them a full week. My first job in industry, I had a 1-week training course in cGMP documentation - at Baxter, we give people 30 minutes. We put them in an environment with a bunch of machines that are prone to breakdowns, don't give them time to read and understand their procedures, then get frustrated when they mess up, despite the fact that we literally set them up to fail.
They're set up to fail on the labor/recruiting fronts, as well. Nearly every department is running on a skeleton crew, and some people don’t have a backup or replacement. If something happens to me, we lose several years’ worth of experience in a very niche position. For manual labor positions, we have forced overtime, and I've known many people who've worked 13+ consecutive 12-hour shifts. It's difficult to recruit for positions due to higher paying, better companies in RTP, or because most of the people qualified to do anything other than fill a bag either already work here or we've ran them off long ago. Then they institute a hiring freeze (because that's going to help our recruiting problems!), and we're left scratching our heads as to why we can't fill our positions.
But the thing I am upset about the most at Baxter is putting patients at risk by rushing to return to production as soon as possible any time that something unexpected happens. We get rushed by batch release, engineering, doc control, quality management, manufacturing, maintenance, and facilities department to do our jobs as quickly as we can. I can't tell you how many times I've had the "your predecessor used to just do this, or sign that" discussion. And it's because that pressure is coming to them from the top. What's really more important, taking a few extra minutes to make sure our product is safe and acceptable, or grinding out a few extra bags?
We really need some help here guys. Please look into these matters with urgency and change the way this works!
