Pros
Generally, personnel on the Mobile Accessories Team were pleasant enough to work with; competitive salary, respectable benefits, centralized office location is great for suburban commuters.
Cons
The team is managed through an authoritative mindset that stifles new talent out of the gates. Team members are rarely empowered with decision-making and are highly micro-managed. When they do venture to make an independent decision, they are habitually overturned and discounted. This, over very short time, leads to downtrodden, unconfident employees who are dependent on guidance and approval and end up with little more ability than to do precisely what they are instructed. This employee deterioration also attributes to the unavoidable erosion of any collaborative trust network that is essential to team– and incredibly high turnover. During my one year of employment, I was the ninth person to leave the MA team. And, from what I learned during that time, 19 people proactively chose to leave the team within the last three years. That fact alone should speak volumes about what it’s really like to work on the MA team at Fellowes. We can’t all be disgruntled employees with poor performance and bad work ethic. We can’t all be written off as ineffective. We were all once hired because of what we hoped we could bring to the table – skills, talents, insights and unique experiences to be put to good use if given genuine opportunity. Finally, I can’t even fathom what this turnover attributes to from a financial perspective with regard to training and re-training staff, crippling any forward momentum and team morale. I did often overhear teammate complaints about the turnover in MA marketing and the rude reality of surviving the learning curve of yet another new person getting up-to-speed because of the lack of process documentation and role longevity.