PAREXEL's current upper management seems to fail in restructuring the organization and risk ongoing studies.
Pros
Work Life and Family balance. You can work very indepently and choose home-office options (unfortunately these benefits will be changed and people need to pay their own travel costs and equipment). Communicating with people every day and all over the world is very inspiring. Global studies can be planned easily, since there are CRAs in most countries in the world.
Cons
There seem to be people in upper management who do not understand the Clinical business, since they choose names for different CROsections or Job Descriptions which are very unusual and misleading to Sponsors. This is noted especially during the current reorganisation of the whole organization. As previous reviews here at glassdoor mention, there seems to be a strange attitude of directors to hire people for very unclear reasons and then try to get rid off people again, even though these people are considered one of the outperformers (maybe they are too expensive for PAREXEL). Almost every director of a department seems to think to be able to make decisions without asking employees who do the real job. This leads to a very strange and antisocial relationship between employees and supervisors and also among employees. This is aggrevated by not having any lunch canteen or social meeting rooms. The lack of internal team meetings lead to the strange situation, that every person suffers from the same problems in setting up a study again and again and tries to invent the solution in an individual way which is not compliant with the way a previous project managers did in a similar situation. Directors do not seem to understand the day-to-day work and do never ask for feedback to the employees. Quality group creates artificial SOPs which do not reflect the issues in set-up of EDC studies, since they are not related to the day-to-day study maintenance work. The severest problem is the missing feedback loop to upper management. Since line managers do not ask their employees for feedback of work-life or the supervisor's performance, line managers cannot give appropriate feedback to upper management and I presume upper management is not seeking to get feedback neither. This leads to a strange atmosphere, where often the Sponsor is in good relationship with the project people, but directors and business managers are blaming the own project managers in front of the Sponsors for any faults or mistakes in the project - by the way, it is often the mismanagement of lacking resourcing databases or missing software updates of older EDC or CTMS systems and not the people's fault that study come into troubles. The current low ranking in a huge CRO survey seems to reflect this ongoing mismanagement appropriately.