management - Anonymous employee Holcim Employee Review

The employee cycle at Lafarge is: get hired, work as hard as you can, maybe get promoted / rotated a few times, get sold off or packaged out. Employees are numbers, at one time the HR was sending paper mail (great IT systems) with "hey employee number, is how much you are costing Lafarge". There are stories with people being lined up on a hallway to receive the pink slip. My favorite HR process at Lafarge was the quasi-mandatory 3 year overseas (expat)/ rotational management assignment - this ensured that every senior manager would ultimately reach the Peter Principle level much faster than in other companies! From a certain level in the organization, management is completely closed to ideas, and acts like in the years of the French kings (we have a visit from the King to the plant). Very French centric even though the official language is English, very centralized and out of touch, with some absurd solutions (trying to transplant processes from Africa to North America). Since the disaster acquisition in 2008 in Egypt, customer comes last, cost cutting comes first, and all departments try to shift cost and work to other departments. If you are a customer, know the people who pick up the phone have likely double or triple the workload from 5 years ago. No real strategy to talk of, except for cost cutting. No vision, this company only works because it has a localized quasi-monopoly, and there's a high barrier of entry. With the merger, at least a third of the people have to go in a year or so, so can't think of any good reason anyone would want to join the company.