Good people and projects work opportunities but too many bean-counters are creating pressure on operations teams to deliver with insufficient resources (training, hours) that are not well-managed.The good thingsThe calibre of staff employed by Honeywell are high - from technicians and engineers, project / account managers and administrators through to operations managers and higher level corporate managers. They are a professional team and a very capable one.
Especially in relation to the technical operations / project delivery teams - the techs and engineers get along well across different disciplines and functional groups. I am friends with most if not all my peers and everyone else seemed to generally work and get along well.
The challengesThe culture within the Project team is for staff to deliver very demanding work across many disciplines with tight resources.
For example - a lot of work on high-profile jobs and construction sites with Builders (clients) is typically fast-paced with tight budgets.
Contracts between Honeywell and clients are often signed at very high level and, especially in the last 5 years, reliant on assumptions about good human-resource availability and good technical capability. However, jobs typically get delivered by skeleton staff (usually the same few crucial high performers) who are expected to also cover a very wide number of tasks outside of their primary roles to fill gaps in staff availability.
The prevailing work culture, especially by managerial staff of the Projects team where I worked, was that overtime is inevitable and should generally go unpaid.
Although peer-nominated merit awards are offered as a concessionary incentive, most of the people succeeding and delivering projects to a good standard are typically those who consistently and regularly sacrifice their personal time to fill in the time-and-budget gaps created by poorly estimated projects or ones won through 'buying the job'.
The business is very siloed and this creates conflicting strategic directions:
Bean counters count beans and put pressure on technical teams to deliver - but this is normal.
Technical staff need to deliver quality work and fully functional without enough resources - when more staff/help is needed, they are referred to an overseas engineering team that has been proven to be incapable and unsuitable.
Hourly rates are massive for the industry in general and in my opinion not justifiable or sustainable - it is caused by massive overheads, an abundance of office staff not directly delivering projects or service work.
Operations managers want a capable, efficient and multi-skilled team but can't afford it - they are forced to spread their teams thin, but fail to maintain morale or offer the required support they ask for.
A lot of the time, and I believe moreso than I would be in Industrial work than Commercial work, I was instructed or required to compromise the quality of my work to 'just cross the finish line in time'. This conflict fundamentally with how I believe engineering should be done.