material handler

operator

manufacturing operator

team leader

technician

Shape Corp

If you are there more than a year then you are considered something that needs to be changed. These guys change things for the sake of change and not necessarily for improvement. In fact very little change is actually for improvement.
Some leaders were promised one thing when they were hired in and never got the thing that they were promised. Be very wary about what you are told when the recruiter reels you in. The bottom line is they don't care about your position or who you are or what you can contribute to the company if you are there after a production manager change. The new production manager will run things their way, and if they don't agree with the way things have been done in the area, even if those things work, they will still completely change everything to the point of removing and demoting personnel if you do not think like that particular production manager. So every time there is an upper management change, several  team leads, backup production leads, or weld technicians are displaced. This is done regardless of what they have done for the area or how long they have been in the area.
Turnover is rampant among the team leads due to no promotions. Team leads go elsewhere in that case where they can get paid more and be treated with more respect for their position then they are treated at Shape Corporation.
When you try to bring experience or solutions for issues from places that you have worked before in order to let shape benefit from those suggestions or countermeasures, prepare to get shot down and told that it will not work at Shape Corporation. This will happen even if you have 5 years of experience in production previous to joining the company.
One big thing for me was that even though shape touts that they are veteran-friendly, that is only the recruiter talking. The recruiters are pro veteran but most of the management could or less if you are a veteran or were a veteran either officer or enlisted in any branch of the service. They will not use your talents and if you bring suggestions or concerns to their attention, they will look at it is an attack on their authority and you will most likely find yourself running a press brake or a weld cell in another area if you are a backup production leader, team lead, or weld technician. Although there are some members of management that will utilize your talents if you have been in the military, these "Superbosses" are few and far in-between.
Positive reinforcement is almost non-existent. When it is done it is almost condescending. An example of this is when you happen to mention to your production lead that you fixed something that you end up fixing every other week and he jumps for joy and applauds heartily shouting "bravo bravo!"
The introduction of bump caps created a caste system. The bump caps are a good Improvement, however, it also creates a caste system because each pay grade wears different color hats which creates quite a bit of animosity in the workplace. This is especially true if you see a mid-management or engineer making a bonehead move, which is all too common. Bump caps would be completely better with one color for everyone. Respect is earned, not gifted by a hat.

I started working at the 1835 Hayes location which I absolutely loved. The training was excellent, the people were laid back, and friendly, and the work was fairly easy to do. However, due to lack of sales I was transferred to the 172nd St. location. That place is an absolutely horrendous mess. Training involves reading standardized work on a computer which is often incorrect and difficult to read and comprehend. People will help you but if you get told the wrong info you could get a write-up for performing your job incorrectly. Supervisors and team leads love to threaten write-ups all day long for things no one has a clue you could get written up for. 

It gets really hot in the shop and the supervisors will tell you to stay hydrated but won't let you leave the floor to get water. During an excessive heat wave, I was having symptoms of heat exhaustion but was completely ignored when notifying my supervisor. When my father died, they wanted to write me up for taking a day to mourn when I had documentation from a doctor to be excused because they said it wasn't the right documentation they needed yet my husband's shop took the documentation and excused him with no problem.

Human resources is an absolute waste of time if you have any problems and they are incredibly hard to get a hold of. There is a lot of favoritism going on in regard to picking people for any advancement opportunities.

Expect to be mandated to work every other weekend and be asked to work on your days off as well. They do give you paid and unpaid time off but paid time off has to be pre-approved. Good luck cause they rarely approve any vacation requests.

If you are a smoker, you are only allowed to smoke during your lunch break. They also charge you $50 a month as a surcharge because you smoke even though they lifted their Nicotine Ban and don't charge for any other unhealthy behaviors. I find this highly exploitative and discriminatory.

The company loves to refer to themselves as Shape family. Ha! It's a family alright...an extremely dysfunctional one where you are treated like garbage.

Pros:

* Co-workers are extremely friendly, helpful, and easy to get along with.
* Decent Pay
* Good Benefits

Cons:

* No life outside Shape due to excessive overtime
* Management and Human Resources do not care at all about their employees
* Paid time off is difficult to get approved
* Short breaks
* $50/month surcharge if you smoke
* You pretty much have to train yourself

Production leaders are straight up authoritarian with how little oversight they are given. You may get lucky and get a rare good one, but most are hypocritical dictators. If you can make friends with yours you will get away with everything. If they develop a problem with you (more often personal than professional) they are given every tool to terrorize you. It is an at-will employer with very ambiguous policy, so crazy favors can be done or incredible leaps for punishment can be employed. 

Pay raises are virtually always mediocre no matter how good your performance. You may get dinged for poor performance though. Most of the time the leaders have no idea what or how you're doing all day anyway. Even when minimum pay rates are raised you will not receive your raise to it until your next review; allowing every new hire or less experienced co-worker to begin making more than you no matter how high your raises were in the past or how much more time you have over them. No value for skill or experience. 

Newbies to manufacturing will find opportunities to learn skills and even advance if you put in a little effort and don't get on your bosses bad side. If you last long enough you'll see how favoritism, penny pinching, politics, and bad leaders will erode any sense of fairness or joy you took in this place. Avoid 172nd at all costs.

Culture is terrible. Every man for himself. No sense of nurturing or teamwork. Many trainers are incapable or disinterested in training so I and many others had to learn most things on our own. While they say they want to follow scientific models, they never do. Planners have no idea what they're doing. Everyone thinks they know everything, because acting like you do get you the furthest here. No penalties for being a horrible human being.

I wouldn’t recommend this place to my worse enemy. They play favorites all the time, when you bring a problem to them management just laughs in your face and does nothing about it. They get some people in trouble for the same things that everyone else is doing around there and nothing happens to them. There are way to many of the upper management people that have their kids working there so they of course get to do what ever they want with absolutely no consequences for any of their own actions. I mean you have supervisors living with team leads and their kid that works for the company and the supervisor is over the team leads kid. I mean this place will do any and everything in their power to keep all the problematic people with absolutely no work ethic at all and get rid of all the people there that come in every day and on time as well, don’t complain, keep their heads down and do their jobs and know how to run everything in the area. They expect you to run the machines all day long and make numbers that would make anyone tired and when you don’t make the numbers they are all mad and making you come in for mandatory over time even though the reason you didn’t make your numbers is of no fault of your own, it’s the fault of the people that are supposed to fix the machines so that they run probably and when you do finally get someone to come look at it, they “fix” it the cheapest way possible and then expect you to make up for the time you were down the same day. This place says that they are all about family, the only family they care about is their own. They get paid salary and no matter if they are there or not they get paid. They see their families every weekend and those that are hourly NEVER get to see their family. Management is only out for themselves and how they can fatten up their wallets. If you want to be fired for no reason at all (I’ve seen this happen to many times), have no time with your family or kids and feel and be treated like just another number, this is the best place to work for that to happen. I STRONGLY ERGE NO ONE TO WORK FOR THIS COMPANY. If there was an option to give them a 0 star that’s exactly what I would have gave them. 

I currently work at shape as a team lead. When I first hired in I was told to fill out the application for the production lead. But when I got to the interview I was told that they normally don't hire production leads off of the street but that I would be able to make production lead in a year based on my education and my background. Now I have been there over a year as a team lead and I have applied for a lateral transfer into a team lead position on first shift, but that was given to a machine operator. I've applied for 18 different positions all of them which I am qualified for and most of them I am overqualified for. I haven't gotten interviews for most of them. 7 of these where production lead positions. Two of them were quality one positions where the applicant only needs a GED and 5 years of manufacturing experience. Now I have a master's degree and have done doctoral work in management and organizational leadership. I have patience but I don't have that much patience when I see people who are definitely not qualified for management get promoted to management. The culture is the best culture I've seen in 10 years but the promotional abilities are two-faced. For instance I was told in a production lead possession interview that I wouldn't be getting the position because there are production leaders that want to transfer shifts. I had assumed that the same courtesy would be extended to team leads moving shifts as well, but that was not the case. I also took a pay cut coming to this company, but what I found was that they Factor their vacations and burn hours which is also time off into the salary so instead of getting close to the amount of take-home pay that I was getting previously I was getting quite a bit less in dollar amount. So in the salary section I will be putting my take-home pay salary which is quite a bit less then I am used to.

Historically Shape has been a great company to work for up until the last few years. They are not competitive on wages even when you consider the whole package. They dont do anything to retain the people who are killing themselves for the company everyday. They create positions for upper management in order to keep them at the company or get them back to the company. They have eliminated many positions recently and the hard working few get more on their shoulders from the position eliminated but no increase in pay. If you bring it up your told to suck it up and everyone has a lot on their shoulders. If your a hard worker who gets things done and does your job you get more and more work because your capable of handling it. People who have always been pro shape are now extremely negative about the company. Its common sense, take care of the people that take care of you. The problem is the people making the decisions dont see the actual work getting done and who's doing it. They dont bother to walk to floor getting feedback from people on the floor. Upper management is too busy in meetings all day everyday they dont take the time to talk to the people that are breaking their backs for the company on a daily basis. Then when the few brave people who give honest feedback are just considered the "bad apples" because they said the things everyone else isn't willing to say to management for fear from putting a target on their back. There's no consistency between plants and plant mangers. Some plant managers are so worried about their budget they will keep making cuts on crucial people and position in order to save money and ultimately get themselves a bigger bonus. This is just a few of many problems currently with shape. They need to quit saying its a "family culture" it may have been at one point but its nothing like a family culture currently.

Horrible place to work. Management sucks. They overwork you and you’re never compensated for the extra work that you do. The laziest employees and kissers get better raises. So much favoritism and unfairness around this place. They care nothing about you as an employee. It’s all about what you can do for the company. Don’t dare try to take time off of work so that you can spend time with your family. They act like you committed the ultimate sin because you want to use your vacation time that you earned. So much backstabbing. They run all the good workers away then have to replace them with inexperienced people.  So many people quit without notice because Shape has really gone down over the years. It used to be a good family oriented company to work for but now it’s just a sweat shop. Mandatory overtime every other week. You only get 4 days off for the month. Shape got government bailouts due to a Covid and still will not give employees a raise or a bonus. Owners pocketed so much money from the government that was supposed to be used for the employees. It’s just a matter of time  before the whole company gets shut down. It’s bad when employees from all of the Grand Haven facilities and the Alabama facility say the same thing about Shape. You’re just a number to the company. Neither the Verplanks nor Mark White give a care about the employees. I’m sure Gary is turning over in his grave with the way that his sons have run this company into the ground. It’s a sad situation and it’s only getting worse. They have eliminated so many positions and put so much work on others that it’s ridiculous. How can you say we need to produce good quality parts when we don’t even have a Quality department anymore. Shape says they offer work/life balance, that is the biggest lie ever. Let’s not forget that Shape is racist and sexist. 

Let’s start with the good. The benefits are better than most places I’ve worked at. The work itself is not bad, I enjoyed learning welding. I had fun working with my coworkers and getting along with everybody.

Now the bad. A good chunk of management and HR love to boast how they take mental health seriously, but when an employee is actually going through a crisis, even with paperwork from their doctor, they can still be terminated. Management plays favorites and has been predictable with who they promote.   Management will also move people around as they see fit but deny they have such power to do so. They will lie about doing favors for some but not for others. HR is not there to protect you, they’re protecting the company. If they don’t like that you get emotional at times or try to advocate for yourself they will terminate you. You can’t ever speak anything against the company or challenge their way of going about certain processes. Whenever an off shift would put in a good improvement idea, 1st shift would implement it months later and reward the engineers for coming up with the idea. There was always some kind of “shift war” going on. Adults acting like children. HR and management taking things too personal and retaliating. Overtime got out of control and my shift worked months of overtime with no promise of it ending. Breaks were fairly short. For example, a 20 minute lunch is not enough time to eat and allow your stomach to digest some of the food before going back to being very active on the floor.  At the end of the day, they may say they value you, but only until you speak your mind or disagree with them. If you want to work here, you’re best off keeping your head down and not talking.

Worked at this place for 4 years after being in a management position prior. I started as a manufacturing technician which was great and the people I worked with were great. Up until the last year this place has really gone down. I was at the 172nd plant on 1st shift and the production manager of my area was very unprofessional. They had almost all the employees friended on Facebook, and if they didn’t like you they would make it known. I’m actively pursuing my bachelors in Human Resources and after what I have learned I recommend going to another place. The production managers are allowed free reign to do whatever they please without consulting the HR department to see what kind of repercussions their decisions could have, they preach family values but treat everyone like they can be replaced in an instant. They rolled out “flex time” for everyone but the only people allowed to use it are office people and if you are on the floor they say it won’t work for your “position” I applied as a manufacturing tech, a team leader, and when I was a Material Handler and was denied. When they caught wind that I was considering quitting to peruse more credits during the summer the production manager decided I did not have enough “experience” over the other guy who drove with me. Even though I had been liscensed and driving far longer than him. When I discussed this with my Human resource person they had no idea that I was being demoted. I ended up putting my notice in, and I’m glad I have because all of my former co-workers tell me that they are firing people left and right over small infractions!

I worked for shape twice, once as a rollform operator in which I had a lot of success. Was encouraged by my supervisor to get into leadership and reluctantpy agreed. After a job freeze, and waiting to hear back on 3 supvisor and back up supervisor jobs I was well qualified for, I heard nothing for 6 months. I still loved what I did as a rollform operator so I stayed. But while shape put me on the back burner I was offered a production manager role at another company. It was too good of an offer to pass up at my going age. The company I went to work for ran into financial trouble and laid us off. I returned to shape and chose to work in the stampings plant which was a huge mistake. At stampings I was approached about leadership and told them I was on board. I enrolled in leader boot camp and in 6 months never received a review, a raise, or any further help on the leadership track I was sought out to discuss. At this point I approached upper management and pleaded to be sent back to rollfofming and was never given and answer. For family reasons I had to move on. Would love to work here again in the future but would like the oppunrtinity to be consider end for the positions and experiences my managers pushed me into pursuing in the first place. Shape is an amazing company who has invested a lot that it didnt have to into keeping grand haven alive.

Top Job Titles	Average Salary
Material handler 5 salaries reported	$19.03 per hour
Operator 4 salaries reported	$19.01 per hour
Manufacturing operator 4 salaries reported	$18.58 per hour
Team leader 1 salary reported	$22.53 per hour
Technician 3 salaries reported	$22.46 per hour

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