Great people but organization lacking any kind of structure - Anonymous employee Solvay Employee Review

Leadership is usually smart but is often not that interested in their people. Development seems to be more of a word to sound modern than a real HR concern. There is no structure at all, this is a matrix organisation with no strategic direction, clear decision processes or binding job descriptions: many high-level managers try to do everyone else's jobs at the expense of efficiency. Insane amount of wasted time, energy and money doing that. Very short-term oriented (way more than other companies in the chemical industry). Even with clear data showing the issues, decisions can be taken that are clearly detrimental to medium-term (<1 year) profitability to fit a short-term need. New (often good) tools are always deployed to be abandoned the year after. Current goal-setting processes for executives leads to an extremely regional focus: the company as a global entity is irrelevant, only the region counts (leading to wasteful spending and decisions by regional managers striving, understandably and logically, to reach and exceed their objectives).