software engineer

assembler

field service engineer

project manager

senior software engineer

Philips

Effective leadership is the most critical factor for organizational success in the 21st century. “People don’t leave bad companies, they leave bad managers.” You have to be very careful about the people who call themselves a leader, especially the ones with Pseudo - Leadership tendencies. Many of these people are only concerned about their well being, nothing else.

Within the dental business unit, fearful inside sales employees stick around because they get so institutionalized; they believe every company has the same management or culture. It was astonishing to see how many of my former colleagues thought that the treatment & attitudes given by the “leadership team” were common amongst most companies. In a true sales organization, this could be further from the truth.

Behavioral toxicity prevailed throughout this division in many ways & is uncharacteristic of other divisions as a whole. The level of acceptance of ineptitude behavior is astounding & in most instances, unfathomable.

• Within the dental inside sales team, you are asked to code out when you need to use the restroom.

• In one instance, they actually held (2) conference calls (> 40 mins. each) outlining on “How to leave a [scripted] voicemail” for clients if this is any indication as to some of the types / level of individuals they employed.

• When discussing work ethics & working hard, a fellow colleague responded, “Why? Management doesn’t value that type of behavior.” 

• When the dental inside sales team was asked to work remotely, a question was posed regarding reimbursement for corporate use of personal internet. The question was met with, “Why? Don’t you have internet at home? We’ll have to check into that.” Subsequently, there was NEVER any follow up regarding this matter. I’ve never worked for an organization that expected you to use your personal resources for the benefit of an organization with no options for reimbursement.

• If this current pandemic has proven nothing else, it’s that this specific (dental) inside sales force can function from any location in the world. How did the leadership team decide to reward its employees? They relocated ALL of the inside sales roles & “supervisory” roles to Tennessee with the exception of the department's head. To incentivize the sales team to remain in their roles throughout the transition & train your successor, they offered those willing to remain $5K & an eventual pink slip.

• A major irritant & source of frustration was the lack of attention paid to the constant complaints from clients when contacting customer service in Canada due to language barriers. Oftentimes, they were not able to be understood (accents) & yet, the leadership team would continually hire similar folks for these “customer facing roles.” It reflected poorly on the organization as a whole & further highlighted the lack of value that corporate placed on the dental division as its only viewed as a “cash cow” division.

• The dental inside sales representative role is NOT a sales role at all. It is nothing more than a “glorified customer service” role where clients call in & place orders for what they need. To deem it anything other than that is misleading & a false narrative. Minimal actual selling or consultative selling occurs at all, if ever. If actual sales experience is what you want, this is NOT the role to take.

“A TEAM is not a group of people who work together.
A TEAM is a group of people who trust each other.”

This dental inside sales division, in particular, fosters neither.

What is the best part of working at the company?
The best part was the help desk team itself. It was a solid group of people who worked well together and took the work seriously. Having dependable coworkers made a real difference, especially in a support role where you rely on each other to keep things moving. The camaraderie within the team was the highlight of the job.

What is the most stressful part about working at the company?
The most stressful part was dealing with difficult end users and an uneven workload between support tiers. Some employees were openly hostile — yelling at vendor technicians while they were actively troubleshooting, nitpicking arrival times (complaining if you showed up even a few minutes early for an appointment), or questioning whether you were qualified to do the job you were there to do. That kind of treatment made routine support calls more stressful than they needed to be.
On top of that, the workload wasn't distributed fairly. The Level 1 help desk would cherry-pick the tickets they wanted to handle and pass the harder ones up to Level 2, regardless of whether they actually required escalation. That meant Level 2 was consistently absorbing work that should have been resolved at the first tier, which added unnecessary pressure to an already demanding role.

What is the work environment and culture like at the company?
The culture was a real mixed bag. Within the help desk team, the environment was good — coworkers were competent, collaborative, and genuinely supportive of each other. That part of the job worked well.
The broader company culture was harder to navigate. Some end users treated IT support staff and outside vendors poorly, with hostile behavior that wouldn't have been tolerated in most workplaces. There was also a lack of accountability between support tiers, where Level 1 would pass off tickets they didn't feel like handling instead of resolving them, leaving Level 2 to absorb the extra work. The disconnect between a strong team culture at the support level and the way IT was treated elsewhere in the company made the overall environment inconsistent.

What is a typical day like for you at the company?
A typical day involved handling help desk tickets at the Level 2 tier — troubleshooting laptops, desktops, printers, and other end-user issues across the company. That included hands-on repairs, remote support, coordinating with outside vendors like IBM for hardware service calls, and working through escalations from the Level 1 team.
The work itself was steady and varied, which kept things interesting. A good portion of the day was also spent absorbing tickets that had been passed up from Level 1 — sometimes appropriately, sometimes not — which meant the workload was often heavier than it should have been. Between the technical work and managing interactions with a demanding user base, the day rarely slowed down.

For me, at the start of each week I was assigned the type of work I would need to handle for the week (Demographics denials, authorizations, appeals, etc.). 

Every day, you're expected to complete a number of denials based on both the complexity of the denial, and, what your daily schedule looks like. They expect you to write down and share EVERYTHING you were doing on a given day and for how long (work, meetings, breaks, etc.). In my department, on average, we're expected to resolve about 7ish insurance denials an hour which leaves you about 8 minutes a claim to open the claim, figure out what's wrong, gather all necessary info and correct it. No one on the team between inexperienced & experienced employees think this is a reasonable amount of time. If you're on a phone call with an insurance company and it takes you 15+ minutes to resolve you will be penalized on your 'Productivity Reviews' for not doing enough. And that's just the productivity review. There's also the QA review to discuss

THE NEXT POINT APPLIES TO ALL PHILIPS EMPLOYEES on our team. Not just insurance specialists.

The company will review the quality of your work but there are frustrations with that process as well. Generally, my team is expected to follow  a guide (SOP) for the completion of any task. However, I have had cases where I was reviewed and marked poorly for following the guide TO THE LETTER. And there are other cases where I use my better judgement because I was previously dinged on the performance reviews, but, I am then marked poorly for not following the guidelines. There is little consistency with expectations, and, the guide doesnt even actually provide clear instructions sometimes. In insurance, there are too many edge cases to consider, being reprimanded because it's literally impossible to follow the guide is unfair. And I've overheard conversations from the customer service department, I cant even imagine how frustrating their QA reviews are.

The work culture is non existent. Everyone is nice enough, but it is the embodiment of a soulless corporation, you come to work, have soulless conversations, and in my case, if you need help you dont even talk to anyone in the Chicago office. I'm expected to call people in the Pennsylvania office. What is even the point of making us come into the office? It's nice that the role hybrid It should be fully remote. 

And I've had instances where the person meant to teach me literally ignored my Teams messages or dismissed my concerns. She is incredibly unhelpful and doesn't listen to me. Maybe other people are more lucky in regards to managers though.

I tried to convince myself the benefits were worth all these headaches but they're not. Don't work here, I'm looking for another job

If you're looking for a job here, be fully prepared to work your life away. Some areas have been working 7 days a week for the last 6 or more months, and there's no end in sight for when that's going to stop. We're only guaranteed one weekend off. Exhaustion, low morale, and depression runs high in the floor workers anymore and I, myself, have been trying to get out of there for a while for my own mental health. 

I've been fighting to get onto first shift for 4 years now, and every time I inquire about it, some excuse is given to me. Meanwhile, other people are getting their request for first shift with no problems at all. The pay isn't great either. New hires are coming in making almost what I'm currently making after being there for 8 years. If you want first shift, don't expect to get it anytime soon. 

Management has no idea what they're doing, and we're constantly running out of parts. In turn, we end up having an even bigger backlog, which means, you guessed it, more overtime. The work life balance doesn't exist. You're working. All. The. Time. For someone that doesn't have children or elderly to take care of, those individuals might enjoy the overtime. However, I have family to take care of and I can't do that properly with how I'm working constantly. 

As soon as we manage to get somewhat out of a hole, something happens that throws us right back in it leading to even MORE overtime. The turnover rate has skyrocketed because of the overtime and the extensive exhaustion we're all feeling. Health issues are becoming more prominent, both physical and mental, throughout the plant as well because of the overtime. 

The company says that they care about our mental and physical health, when in reality, I'm being shown something completely different. The chairs are shot, and we've been begging for new chairs for years now. Meanwhile, the supervisors got brand new desks while we keep getting told that it's not in the budget for us to get new chairs so we're comfortable doing our jobs every single day. 

It wasn't always like this, but in the 8 years that I've been with the company, it's rapidly declined and I have little faith in the Reedsville facility at this point. There's a lot of other issues as well, more than I can list. It's disheartening and depressing to see the company going the way it is, and I have little to no faith that it's going to remain open much longer if they don't get their act together. Either their going to drown in the backlog, or they're not going to have any employees left to do the work because everyone walked out. 

On an individual basis, work related to the job can be very rewarding. The big issue is that the overall business is very disjointed when it comes to thinking and acting strategically. Their is very little alignment between groups and unless you drive things yourself, you cannot expect your counterparts to come through. Many only know what they know and want to "stay in their lane." The ability to think holistically and strategically is not possessed by many there. In fact, it feels more like a factory than an innovation hub or center of excellence, and many like it that way.

In the end, it's a great opportunity to work within a global framework - whether with internal stakeholders or suppliers, and you have the opportunity to really learn a lot about how to run a business. In some sense, with the organization being such a small unit, you almost get to operate as a "mini GM" and make important decisions that have a big impact to the product and/or program.

A disappointing part of the job entails obtaining buy-in from all of the stakeholders within the organization. Many have their own agenda and often times it feels like herding cats to get things done. Unless you're truly assertive things will not get done, and you should expect to be disappointed even when you feel/think there's alignment on a game plan. The truly hard part of the job is Sr. Mgt's role in the dysfunctionality that presently exists - many establish standards and expectations that they themselves don't adhere to. Furthermore, a vast majority of the leadership team lack the true strategic vision and ability to genuinely rally the troops. This may be in part to them not leading by example. 

In general, over the past several years the retention rate of employees has been horrendous and I attribute this to the bad employee morale coupled with Sr. Mgt's tactics of employing European values on an American workforce.

Pay is adequate for contract work. Sales contractors make no commissions. However, the management leaves a lot to be desired. They start projects with people that do not know how to run them. I brought them many compliance issues... one being placing inadequate information in their CRM Salesforce system that is actually used to market people that clearly was not for the persons name to be entered off the lead. When I brought this to my Manager she just looked at me along with the trainer... and said just enter it. Basically, that I should not worry about it. That it was a management issue and I am not management. Yet, she was and she disregarded the issue and I was sent to my desk to go make sales calls and place inadequate information into their sales leads funnels. Ethical issue if you ask me. Someone will one day be marketed with someone else's name to their email.  This is the type management they have.

On top of that, her manager also had a problem about me asking questions... since the next day after me asking her a question on an issue they were addressing in a meeting... I was released from the project.  I told her I was an ethical person and will not do anything that compromises my ethics or could be a compliance issue. She got a bit defensive in the team meeting and answered the question incorrectly... trying to slide over what I was asking. She did not want to answer the question but instead tried to disregard it. 

I am good with their decision to end my project time there, because I refuse to sit down while the company or the people I work with or the customers I am there to change the lives of get disrespected. I have morals and ethics to protect and would rather be unemployed that surround myself with people like that.

I am not done...  I will be writing to the higher ups at Philips to let them know what they have on their hands. I am sure they would love to know their managers are running their new projects like this... then they wonder why the sales numbers are like that. They will soon know.

This review is made in reference to the new Nashville GBS Hub location only.

Management at the GBS hub in Nashville is currently looking to cut costs no matter the expense to the employees. There are employees that moved from other locations within the last year that are being targeted for removal because of their salary levels and because of poor management decisions that led to over-hiring. 

Often times the company's mission statement gets lost in the shuffle of just trying to meet production quotas/deadlines. This is unfortunate because a lot of the innovative ideas employees have are shut down or not even recognized to begin with; this is regardless of the fact that they would presumably help the overall bottom line and/or speed-up work flow. 

It is my feeling that these current issues are a result of poor management of the entire GBS hub. They will pass with time and the unit will likely stabilize, but it will be at an enormous and senseless cost of many stellar individuals and opportunities where we could have handily beat out our competitors if only we focused more on our old mantra of "Innovation and You."

Now, that all being said, in previous years, Philips has been an excellent company to work for. I sincerely hope they reclaim that status. I would recommend working at the Nashville GBS hub if you are just getting into your career and/or you don't require the higher end of your current salary expectations. Also, if you'd like the opportunity to work at a Fortune 500 company and if you're willing to weather the inevitable frustration you will witness in your coworkers as their jobs are squelched, go for it!

I attempted to work with Philips from home during the COVID-19 situation. They shipped a ThinkPad to my home but the configuration process was a mess. Among the problems was they had me first set up software, then set up my MS profile, which is not the correct configuration sequence. After half a dozen or so phone and Skype calls to their remote tech support (somewhere in SE Asia) I asked for someone in Nashville to assist me with my software and remote connection issues. Nobody would do so. My manager claimed she had the same issues prior to the office closing due to COVID-19 and had to get a non-Philips family member to assist her in setting up her work computer. So the problem was not due to the office being closed; it was typical under normal circumstances at Philips. That told me all that I needed to know. They have been told by their auditors that they are not GAAP-compliant which is a very bad sign. I was also told their accounting department has an open floor plan with no assigned workspace, which should never happen.

They will tell you that they use SAP but their system is not fully integrated and they used several systems which made accounting, particularly reconciliations, very difficult, confusing, and cumbersome. I was told after I was hired that in some cases it took up to several months for new employees to get access to all of the SAP modules that I would need (AP, AR, GL). Once again, this guesstimate was based upon a pre-COVID-19 hiring.

The laptop that I was given was a Lenovo ThinkPad with a screen less than 15” and no auxiliary ten-key. This is completely inadequate for someone who would be spending a lot of time working with spreadsheets and ledgers.

This is clearly not a company that believes in giving employees what they need in order to get the job done.

I liked what I did for a job. I liked the pace most times. I worked in an area with three areas and if we only have two of the three people it gets stressful. What doesn't help is when management pulls a second person to a line that has plenty of people. Leaving one of us to fill all three which is impossible. I truly dont believe the lead is professional at all. I think Skype needs monitored more. Benefits are great though. Cant beat them. But I wish they'd be more considerate on time off when it comes to bereavement. I didnt like using vacation when thats not my idea of a vacation. Also don't understand the role of the HR. Especially when her first response to any concern is "did you call people services". What is she even getting paid to do? We do all our paperwork for the job online. All the benefits and tests online. Her money could easily go back to the employees who fill a role that makes a difference. They are also supposed to be huge on family time. Well that's false. They were supposed to put in music in September. That is false. They were supposed to cut back overtime with now being a three shift operation. That was false too. I walked into a place with lots of false hopes. I worked at a job where I was working 11 hours a day and never saw my family. I have two small children and still never see them at this job. They took in orders they knew we couldn't meet. And instead of taking back the overtime they now require you to work every weekend but one Saturday a month. And being third shift we literally work every single day. We get done Saturday morning. Sleep all day. Still no time with family. Then go back again Sunday night. I know that's how manufacturing works. But we aren't even treated like people that have family outside of there. Were just treated like property.

Philips is a great place for new welders to get experience to build their resume. You will be hired at the lowest pay they can offer, unless you have a really good amount of experience and will fight back and forth for the pay that you deserve before hire. It's very unfortunate that the Latham location is the way it is, because it has the potential to be a great place to work. The old timers there, that have been there since the beginning, make decent money because they've been there 15+ years. They would tell me "this place isn't like it used to be", following up with complaints about the new management (Philips took over original company) and how they're just a bunch of entitled bully's who don't understand how much time and effort can go into one work order. The managers will pay you next to nothing and will expect you to go above and beyond every day. And if you're not working over time every day and especially on the weekends.. you're trash to them. And here's the kicker.. even if you are working a crazy amount of hours and busting out orders, you still wont get a raise because they know (or think) you're not going to leave because they provide you with PPE for free and its 'clean'. Philips is extremely behind in meeting order deadlines, and continue to take more orders. You can stock up your area everyday plus some, and more than half of your products will be gone in the morning when you return. Then the managers still look at you like you're slacking trash when you're breaking your body and committing 90% of your time every day to that place, for nothing.

Top Job Titles	Average Salary
Software engineer 5 salaries reported	$122,000 per year
Assembler 15 salaries reported	$19.93 per hour
Field service engineer 5 salaries reported	$38.50 per hour
Project manager 3 salaries reported	$113,333 per year
Senior software engineer 1 salary reported	$47.00 per hour

Working at Philips: Company Overview and Reviews

Philips

Philips Ratings

Popular jobs at Philips

Salary Satisfaction

Job Seeker Tools

Employer Tools

Browse

Stay Connected