Solvay reviews

4.0

80% would recommend to a friend

(859 total reviews)
avatar

Philippe KEHREN

93% approve of CEO

50% positive business outlook

Solvay has an employee rating of 4.0 out of 5 stars, based on 859 company reviews on Glassdoor which indicates that most employees have a good working experience there. The Solvay employee rating is in line with the average (within 1 standard deviation) for employers within the Manufactura industry (3.5 stars).

Reviews by job title

859 reviews
4.0
Nov 29, 2014

Great people but organization lacking any kind of structure

Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Very smart, high-caliber people are very common which is great to learn and be challenged. Solid business, diversified and with good to great prospects. Pay is quite competitive and benefits are very good.

Cons

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).

1.0
Nov 11, 2014
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Good people to work with, (fairly) recession-proof segment of the economy

Cons

Management at site sets personal vendettas against disliked employees, no fairness in treatment, no training program whatsoever- whatever job you have, expect to have it forever, company has had no clue how to handle a production facility this diverse or this in need of infrastructure improvement and uses spaghetti marketing in it's attempts to maintain/improve processes, weak-sauce union representation- if you make a mistake, don't expect the union to be able to help you keep your job, poor safety policies and follow through on said policies

Viewing 136 - 138 of 859 Reviews

Glassdoor has 2,130 Solvay reviews submitted anonymously by Solvay employees. Read employee reviews and ratings on Glassdoor to decide if Solvay is right for you.