Tesla Employee Satisfaction Improvement

[notAmeenPerson]

Just a brief question. I was browsing through Glassdoor last night and came upon the Tesla Motors reviews page. The majority of the reviews seem to be moderately positive. A couple of the more reasonable negative ones raised some interesting concerns. A challenging work life balance and turnover in certain departments was briefly mentioned. However the comments about poor salaries, some instances of poor middle management, and a potential lack of internal promotion are more frequent.

In your views, how do you see some of these improving after the next couple of years as profitability and volume increase?
And as a reference Tesla's aggregate rating (3.5) is the same as General Motors (3.5) and marginally lower than Ford (3.8).



Personal Note: I was hesitant to present this question. Things that have the remote potential of being slightly critical of TM seem to elicit unfortunate comments on occasion.

 

[jerry33]

When you work for a large company, the only time you get a raise or promotion is when you go to some other company. Big companies begrudge the fact that they have employees. Tesla doesn't seem to be any different in this regard.

 

[cwerdna]

When you work for a large company, the only time you get a raise or promotion is when you go to some other company.

As someone who worked for a very large company for over a decade (left long ago), that's certainly not true. I got both w/o going anywhere.

Also, unfortunately, that company had a goofy policy about "time in level". Apparently, the clock starts ticking the moment you get promoted (to a higher job level). If you stay in a job level for too long, that starts raising red flags. Nobody told me that until I transferred to another group and my new manager brought it up. There's much more I could write about their goofy policy and other stuff (mostly HR BS) associated with it.

 

[Pdub2015]

As someone who worked for a very large company for over a decade (left long ago), that's certainly not true. I got both w/o going anywhere.

Also, unfortunately, that company had a goofy policy about "time in level". Apparently, the clock starts ticking the moment you get promoted (to a higher job level). If you stay in a job level for too long, that starts raising red flags. Nobody told me that until I transferred to another group and my new manager brought it up. There's much more I could write about their goofy policy and other stuff (mostly HR BS) associated with it.

i currently work for a relatively large company (80k employees), and as cwerdna notes, raises and promotions are very much part of the environment. So are yearly performance bonuses, spot bonuses, recognition, individual development plans, tuition reimbursement, free training and a bunch of other perks. But raises, promotions and bonuses have to be earned. There seem to be a small subset of workers that feel these should be automatic.

That said, it's also true that changing to another company is usually the route to maximizing one's income, as our company does have some HR policies that limit the amount of in-position or promotion-based raises. But even these can be overridden by executive sign off, so if you're worth the money, you can probably get it. HR policies aren't always the greatest, but I understand the rationale.

Tesla, though, is in quite a different situation. It's still a relatively young company with a lot of growing to do, so I don't expect them to get the human resource area perfect right away. I'd be interested in knowing which departments are facing the most churn.

- - - Updated - - -

Just skimmed thru some of the comments at Glassdoor, and immediately found some inconsistencies, i.e. an intern complaining that there's no free gym (!), while a production associate lists the free gym as a plus.

in any case, as the company continues to grow and attracts top management talent in critical areas, the human capital picture will likewise improve.

 

[dhrivnak]

Dedicated employees

I can see where working for Tesla would be challenging. But I have met a number of employees over my 5 years of ownership and they all seemed VERY enthusiast about the company and their jobs. All have gone well above and beyond to make things right for the customer.

And example was this weekend when I dropped by the Showroom/service center Saturday to pick up my car while returning from a trip. I live 200 miles from the service center so trips there are not easy. My car was having TPMS issues and while it was supposed to be fixed it was still throwing an error Saturday afternoon. While the shop was closed Saturday and I offered to leave the car, a service tech dropped by and replaced the faulty sensor. That way I was able to drive the car home rather than make a second trip or wait for a delivery. To drop by on your day off, with wife and child in tow, shows extreme dedication. I really appreciated the effort. I can share other similar stories of Rangers truly going well above and beyond.

From my view all Tesla employees are well above average. Amazing.

 

[neroden]

As someone who worked for a very large company for over a decade (left long ago), that's certainly not true. I got both w/o going anywhere.

Also, unfortunately, that company had a goofy policy about "time in level". Apparently, the clock starts ticking the moment you get promoted (to a higher job level). If you stay in a job level for too long, that starts raising red flags. Nobody told me that until I transferred to another group and my new manager brought it up. There's much more I could write about their goofy policy and other stuff (mostly HR BS) associated with it.

Ah, that company is trying to make *absolutely sure* that the Peter Principle will apply to their managers, so that their company will die from incompetence.

 

[Skotty]

Are we talking factory blue-collar jobs, factory white-collar jobs, store jobs, or service center jobs? Those are all entirely different beasts.

@cwerdna
Are employees expected to all become CEO? If you have to keep going up, at some point you are either CEO or have left the company. I don't get it. Not everyone can be the chief.

Work / life balance is generally the biggest problem for me. It's why I haven't applied to work at Tesla or SpaceX. Maybe some day when the kids are out on their own, if I'm not too old, I could get back to committing ungodly hours to my profession. But for now, I've got kids to raise, and have to keep my working hours reasonable.

Note -- on the work/life balance thing -- Elon is a different matter. Since Elon is saving the future of humanity (give or take), he gets a pass on probably not spending enough time with his kids. But if he were just the average Joe, I would criticize that there is no way he is spending enough time on them given his workload commitment. It's perhaps okay if you have a stay at home spouse, but I don't think he has that (nor do I).

 

[cwerdna]

@cwerdna
Are employees expected to all become CEO? If you have to keep going up, at some point you are either CEO or have left the company. I don't get it. Not everyone can be the chief.

Nope. It was a goofy policy. It seemed like they were "not ok" w/people plateauing. From conversations w/previous managers at an earlier time, it didn't sound like it was always this way.

Also, that company also had other wacky policies where after above a certain job level (and title), other rules (presumably more lenient) applied. Also, that "higher tier" of folks were often eligible for fairly automatic very lavish compensation, partly in the form of very generous RSUs w/generous vesting terms (e.g seemed to average out to be ~$800K to $1 million of RSUs the vested over a 3 (possibly 4) year period). This was ~10 years ago. I found out about this via another web site and it was basically documented in the company's SEC filings.

There were essentially two castes, if not three: 1) those at the very top (e.g. C-level or VP in the title), 2) the aforementioned higher tier and 3) everyone else down below, spanning a fairly large job level range.

My current (much smaller) company, fortunately doesn't have such wacky policies, at least in terms of the time in level stuff.