Vantaggi
I believe an individuals Pro/Con perspectives are subjective to their individual preferences and are not in-and-of themselves a good measuring stick of an organization. However, with that said here are a few things that I personally feel are great attributes of Thermo Systems today. 1 – The best management team you will find. During my tenure at Thermo as well as my travel time with previous employers I have had endless opportunities to connect with various personnel at several companies. While working with "boots on the ground" folks to senior and executive management covering many domains from service, maintenance and training to full project work life-cycle, I have yet to come across an organization that has the type of quality leadership that Thermo Systems has from the top down. You will be hard pressed to find better guys than Dave and Greg, I challenge you to do so. 2 – A culture of positive attitude and progressive drive that motivates. Forward movement and growth are systemic within Thermo Systems culture, on all fronts from your personal career, the direction of the company and even your personal life. They say “A rising tide lifts all the boats” well if you are lucky enough to join the team at Thermo, it will be the rising tide in your life. If you’re just out of school you will have tremendous opportunities to learn, travel, build relationships, your career portfolio and a plethora of other awesome things, way too much to list here. If you work hard for Thermo, Thermo will work hard for you. If you don’t work hard for Thermo, Thermo will STILL work hard for you. Why? Because the management team there genuinely wants everyone to succeed. Why? Because when an individual succeeds, the organization succeeds. It’s really that simple. Positivity and encouraging motivation are contagious, desirable, and effectively impacting on most individuals. 3 – Transparency. While some companies hide behind walls, demographics, management and all kinds of other evil trickery, Thermo will lay everything on the table short of people’s individual salaries. Do you want to know what the profitability was on your last project? Want to know if you came in over or under hours? Want to know what the next quarter sales goals are or what percentage you are away from meeting those goals? All of that and pretty much everything else you could ever want to know to improve your job is available to everyone. Some people may think disclosing this much internally is a risk. However, I can say for Thermo that all of this data is used as tools for progress and success, it is empowering professionally, it builds trust, and it works! 4 – Quality Management System (QMS). From your first day at Thermo you will be fully immersed in the QMS. Contrary to some organizations where workflow and company information is outdated, mixed up and bifurcated between random people, documents and “the old filing cabinet in the corner”, Thermo Systems keeps an up-to-date QMS easily accessible electronically for everyone. Do you want to know exactly how to file your expense report with template examples of each field of the document? How about the format for that Detailed Design Spec (DDS) that your director just asked you to deliver by the end of next week. What was that file naming convention and directory path again that I need to save to? All of that and a lot more are in the QMS. It may sound simple, but this is something many smaller companies don’t have the resources to create or keep updated. Thermo makes it a priority as do many of their customers. High end clients will audit their contractors to be sure they have this kind of information keeping deliverables and workflow unified within the organization. If your company doesn’t have it or it’s not up to spec, you could end up losing out on potential work. 5 – Talent. It goes without saying that a think tank like Thermo is chock full of talent. They hire smart people and those people continue to grow professionally with the support of the company throughout their careers. I lost count of how many engineers got their PE’s while I was there. Here is what I noticed that I feel is worth mentioning here. The talent pool is somewhat of a snowball effect, as you bring on more people the knowledge and ability to deliver grows exponentially, not linearly with the addition of new people. That’s due to the ability for people to learn off each other and collaborate, not having to reinvent the wheel every time so to speak. When you have an environment that fosters this kind of communication it makes for a much better day-to-day experience. There are many organizations out there covered with “silos” of information and talent that just causes friction when new people or someone doing something new is trying to get things done. Thermo continuously encourages engineers to work together to problem solve, they have even deployed their own in-house knowledgebase for engineers to collaborate using a real-time searchable database. These are the kinds of investments (and many others) Thermo makes into their workplace that’s valuable to engineers; which keeps good talent around and attracts new talent, hence the talent snowball effect.
Svantaggi
I believe an individuals Pro/Con perspectives are subjective to their individual preferences and are not in-and-of themselves a good measuring stick of an organization. No organization (or relationship) is perfect, if that's what you're looking for then you're setting yourself up for a lifetime of disappointment. Thermo Systems has had growing pains (and that's a good thing!), they have made mistakes (because it's an organization run by human beings who are not perfect) and I have had good days and bad days at the office just like everyone else. BUT HERE'S WHAT MAKES THE DIFFERENCE - some organizations are ok with systemic problems, some so much that it brings them to insolvency. Maybe because the people got lazy at the top of their success, maybe because they could not change fast enough with market conditions (think of K-Mart, Sears, Lehman Brothers), maybe because nobody listened to the guy doing the "boots on the ground" work. Thermo Systems is absolutely NOT ok with systemic problems. Management listens and is more than willing to make changes that will bring success to the organization. This comes from the top down and I believe this flexibility is one of the major things that has led to Thermo Systems unbelievable track record of growth and profitability. They have never had a single layoff in the history of the company. With Washington as messed up as it is today, I don't even know if you would have more job security working for the government. At the end of the day, if your management is WILLING to listen and they are ABLE to implement positive change then you will find that most of your “problems” listed in the “con” sections of other companies would disappear. Do I have "cons" for Thermo - nah, I don't.
