Vantaggi
Management seems to care about the employees. Good benefit programs and a lot of effort is made to keep people aware of what is going on with the business. A lot of success recently in removing people out of jobs they shouldn't be in... but still a lot of work to do there. String of consecutive profitable quarters has been quite impressive.
Svantaggi
Lots of changes in direction... and unfortunately I have to report that the many false starts and poor decisions regarding which markets to attack have broken the trust between top management and the worker bees. There just isn't much confidence that senior management can guide is in the intended direction and achieve the goal of being a top tier company. Revenue and headcount are half of what they were in the early 00's and though a lot of that was getting away from "bad" business which has made us consistently profitable it's hard to look at that history proudly. National has a very old school/top down management style and though it recently has encouraged employees to be "innovative" and "take risks" people are scared to push the envelope as there is seemingly always an imminent layoff that will "deal with" those who stuck their neck out but didn't hit the home run management was looking for. Funny thing is I can't say that people are actually punished for that kind of failure- I haven't seen it directly myself, but the perception that it will happen is certainly there and in some way that might as well be the reality. Result is employees just lay low and get their work done according to what they believe their management wants them to do. Too bad really as this would otherwise be a comfortable place to work and could have some great success if people were able to spread their wings a bit. There's a lot of very smart folks here but the talent is suppressed.