Nice people, very much lack of transparency from upper management - Avis employé Employé (anonyme) Baker Engineering and Risk Consultants

As one reviewer stated, upper management is very "hush hush" about the business direction, and there is quite a lack of transparency on the bigger picture. There is also a lack of vision outside of the niche areas of blast and process safety, which leads to many missed opportunities for multidisciplinary efforts because many people often have blinders on to potential for engaging people outside their niche. This often leads to investigations being led by or staffed by the "usual suspects" (company kind of has a good ole boy club) who keep investigations close to the vest and who may not be the people who are necessarily best suited for that particular type of work. Expectations for getting promoted aren't made clear and seem to be a function of your manager more than your individual performance, experience, or credentials. There is a strong emphasis in promotions on business development metrics and revenue dollars but the manner in which this is captured is not well understood, to the point where getting a consistent answer from management was impossiblr. Also, many opportunities go unpublicized and you only suddenly hear that so and so is the new manager of something (often someone in the "club") and many didn't even know that position was opening up, so people didn't get to fairly compete. The performance evaluation system is onerous and the company's attempts to address it have not been helpful. Compensation, i.e., raises and bonuses, seems divorced from performance reviews since those I spoke with including myself had no idea what to expect each year (I was told there was a "formula" but no one ever shared it with us). Revenue and BD performance metrics were unclear to even DL's and from what I gathered seemed to be tied to those who knew how to game the system (Spiro) or who were in the inner circle to be assigned as PM of investigations, creating a kind of pulling the ladder up behind you culture from the top. Our rate schedule was far higher than many competitors, which is fine maybe for the niche work this company does related to incidents or evidence collection if you want to milk the client for as much as you can (little value add), but it did not make us very competitive for general engineering work, which is where we could have been more value add. Internal processes were often rigid and there was little willingness to change them, even when it created issues with project execution or timely setup of projects, billing, etc. often driven by Contract or conflict of interest related items. I had multiple clients complain that they felt we were difficult to work with because of those things, but there was no willingness to change internally.