Where does one even start talking about all the deficiencies at Intertek - it's such a toxic environment you could easily write an encyclopedia on everything going wrong. Here's the high level summary:
CEO - completely out of touch with the current realities of the modern workplace. Writes a delusional book about "leadership with soul" while simultaneously leading with the energy of a draconic monarch. Has no vision about the future of the company but is instead focused on sacrificing any prospective strategy to line the pockets of himself and shareholders before his retirement.
While the competition understands the changing dynamics of the workforce and leaders are looking for progressive ways to hire and retain talent, LaCroix has completely surrounded himself with spineless sycophants who have created an echo chamber that allows him to be completely blinded to the slew of problems that are destroying his workforce and company from the inside out. Despite working with an enormous c-suite, he still spends an egregious amount of time micromanaging, creating pointless work tasks and driving a culture of fear, instead of offering any sort of true value or inspiration as a leader.
HR - baffling how this department hasn't completely caved in on itself. Despite having a sizeable team, it often takes several attempts for simple things to be processed correctly. If you need any sort of HR related information, good luck! You'll be bounced around endlessly with no one willing to take ownership of the task. The leadership is more concerned with nitpicking the details of how to short change a terminated employee than looking into the pressing matter that the company's churn rate is significantly higher than their industry peers with no one backfilling the roles because of their abysmal reputation.
Nepotism - it only takes a few months of being employed at Intertek to realize that nepotism runs rampant here. Senior managers will often reveal exactly how unsuited they are for their roles when they offer puerile and asinine guidance like "please respond to your emails as fast as you can, even when you don't have a meaningful answer." Safe to say you won't be able to climb up the ladder here unless you chum up with Lacroix or were born with the privilege of being related to one of the significant shareholders.
Disingenuity - Intertek is like a Lamborghini with the engine of a Datsun. They advertise themselves with shiny labels, slogans, and facts about how they were once affiliated with Thomas Edison but beneath it all is a bunch of jaded, tired and disengaged employees who would readily quit if another opportunity became available. Intertek talks about having 10x energy, which is basically aspiring to work 10x more efficiently to be 10x better than the competition but offer no incentive to do this besides the "privilege" to be working for said company and possibly a marginal raise that will be a fraction of inflation. This should give you a sense about how much talent is valued at Intertek. Sure, you might have doubled your targets for the year but did you 10x them ? Don't count on being rewarded or acknowledged unless you've worked yourself to the point of hospitalization and then continue to work remotely from the hospital.
They advertise with slogans like "you won't believe where you'll find Intertek!", which is true because a company of this size that has been around this long is surely going to have their stamp on a lot of things. That said, it doesn't say anything about the quality of the product especially when Intertek has barely managed to stay afloat only by absorbing it's smaller competitors through acquisitions. If you destroy the competition then of course you'll "find Intertek" everywhere.
They present the image that they're a cutting edge company at the forefront of technology, but you can see from many other reviews on Glassdoor that there is an abundance of dated lab equipment that is in dire need of refresh but for which there has been no funds allocated to. This same concept applies to the capital assets and software platforms - some of them are so dated you'll feel like you're working in the stone age and would be more efficient carving your work into a cave wall. Additionally there's virtually no congruity between the platforms so you'll be doing plenty of redundant and non value added work just to accomplish one task.
Communication - what communication ? This area is a complete failure and breakdown of very basic things that you would expect to occur at any other business of this size. When people leave the organization, no one outside of the person's immediate team is notified. You often have to find this information out yourself through other team members or receiving an unfortunate out of office response upon trying to contact the leaver. Management is often so "busy" putting out fires that they barely make time to communicate important process or policy changes to the team below them. It's basically a don't ask, don't tell environment and if you're not actively trying to seek answers and follow up on them yourself, you're certainly not be told through any formal communication channel.
