Pros
Generous PTO. Lots of company-wide holidays.
Cons
Company-wide: Turner is extremely bureaucratic. They have many slow and unnecessary processes. Corporate leadership creates policies and procedures without testing the efficacy of the changes they are making. Instead of revising processes to be more effective, it seems like they just add more processes to the last processes. SAP is not user friendly, should be thrown in a dumpster and set on fire. People waste so much money in time in that program, but Turner refuses to transition to something that would save in time/money in the long run. Suggestions for improvement go unheard. People in general cannot give good reasons why Turner does things certain ways. They are very big brother and have a heavy HR presence, but spend no time collecting or quantifying data on anything work related that could improve their performance and processes. You are not allowed to take food from subs/vendors - no breakfast tacos for you. Perception matters more than actually, you know, improving for real. Turnover is crazy at this company and their solution is to just increase base salaries. Such a bare minimum approach to employee retention, which no surprise, is not working. Austin BU: I really feel for this BU. I met a lot of great people while working here, but they are extremely new to the city, each other, and most seem new to their roles. It will be a challenge for them to stay competitive with established GCs that have more experience in their roles, with their teams, and in the Austin market. They strongly lack true mentorship and there is not a lot of reflection on mistakes. Heavy blame culture - lots of people are quick to trash talk subs or the client when something doesn't go well, instead of brainstorming on what they can do to mitigate/manage risk better in the future/set their teams up for success. A lot of employees seem to get confused about what competencies are most important. There is heavy focus on technical skills and almost no focus on overall development or soft skills. They are more likely to be impressed by someone that knows P6 over someone that truly understands scheduling and sequencing works. Not saying technical skills are not important, but technical skills are much easier to teach. Soft skills and overall/deeper understanding of construction processes are not easy to teach and often take some degree of talent that not everyone has. Safety: In my short time, I saw someone almost cut their finger trying to one hand a bandsaw on their cart right in front of a super. I stopped him and she didn't even bother to look up. Same super did not investigate or record someone getting shocked by a live line. Another super directed people to work on a roof without ensuring they tie off correctly or have roof training and someone fell off and was hospitalized. I tried to stop people from mixing concrete inside a small workspace where multiple trades were working without respirators/n-95s and was told not to interfere by a super. They silica dusted everyone. I tried to get someone to stop standing on the mid rails of a scissor lift and a super told me that "sometimes they have to do that." But they are holding strong on enforcing a few things - podium ladders with a podium gate, the new safety helmets, and zero tolerance for graffiti. Rest assured, there will be no inappropriate poetry in a Turner portacan.
