Avis sur Nordson

-Highly diversified. Can only grow organically at the rate of the economy as different business lines/market cycles offset each other. They use aggressive acquisitions to compensate for this and add revenue. As a result, the company becomes ever more complicated, with different business lines scattered all over the US and the world, overseen by a small corporate office in Northeast Ohio. The management likes the stability of revenues of these offsetting businesses, but it's difficult for shareholders to understand what the company does or how to value its stock. -Aggressive timelines for meeting strategic goals and targets place high pressure on the people in the organization. So, despite a data-driven approach, company employs a dated Management by Objective philosophy to drive management to hit targets every year. Division management has to constantly negotiate with the C Suite to dial back or give extensions on targets. This is probably pretty normal at many American companies, but it's not helpful and creates high stress that's cascaded down the company. Many employees who knew the business well voiced concerns that KPI's and metric data were being manipulated to meet the aggressive targets. Creates an aggressive and individualistic culture. -Takes 80/20 too far. Example: company believes 80/20 also applies to people, segmenting approx. 20% as high performers and 20% as "actively disengaged" low performers. Company management and HR would allude to this belief system in all hands meetings, and employees suspected there was a forced ranking system in place because of unexplainable bad reviews given to solid employees, seemingly to meet a quota. The company execs came of age at a time when comparable companies like GE and ITW used forced ranking and they seem to still believe in this now discredited practice. This ignores bigger systemic reasons for business performance, is disastrous for morale, disincentivizes teamwork and information sharing, increases sucking up, and causes unnecessary turnover of good employees. Because of this, the company has an automatic and built-in level of strife and dysfunction; and automatic low morale. Heard stories about managers being forced to admit to employees that they were giving them a bad review just to meet a quota from above, because it made no sense, then that manager leaving shortly after. Nobody joins a company expecting to walk into this kind of HR regime. -Training is improving somewhat under Naga, as management training and NBS Next training is being instituted for "high performers", but the company still is run on tribal knowledge and little onboarding or training exists in the company for most employees, which can create a sink or swim experience for new hires. Also makes it difficult for them to develop their people internally for new openings, making them reliant on external hiring. -Historically very little in the way of personnel training or policies, so cultures can vary significantly from one team to another depending on the manager. I was not able to find an HR policies manual or handbook there, and HR has little presence. They are unlikely to help if you have an issue. Because of the old-fashioned Management by Objective style, lack of personnel or management training, high turnover, next to no onboarding or training, and legacy cultural issues, crude and coercive management behaviors occurred there and you will have no recourse, until these practices are fixed and a new philosophy is adopted. -Demonstrated negative attitude of management towards blue collar labor. Nordson ICS employees in Amherst, OH went on strike in November 2022, and after settling with them, that division closed down that plant and moved all the manufacturing work to non-union South Carolina. This was after years of very hard work to modernize and streamline the processes in Amherst, and now they discarded all that work and the veteran employees who really knew their jobs, rapidly moving the work to a place where it will take years to set up operations properly and many more years, if not decades, to build the same level of expertise and skill in the employee base. This can't help quality and should drive up costs in every area besides wages in this complex engineering-heavy business. This doesn't seem rational, despite their claim to be guided by data and reason.