Morale is pretty bad these days, given recent layoffs (which seemed pretty random) and last year's pay cuts. Lots of corporate Rah! Rah! marketing programs, emails, posters which for most of us actually are very counter-productive. For the 12th time in 13 years FedEx was voted in Forbes' Top 100 Places to Work. The primary reason given that FedEx is so fantastic: this year we get back half of the 401K match they took away with our pay cuts last year. They had just beefed up the match the year before to compensate us for ditching the pension!
Depending on where you work, you may be plagued with endless meetings. Very often meetings are held not to get input from participants but to disseminate information that could be easily distributed with an email.
There is little room for advancement, in particular technical advancement. The Advisor positions which were created years back might have been used for a more advanced technical position, at least in technical groups, but they are primarily political in nature. Every 'Principal' position - the highest level non-management job - was filled by the buddy system, which is rampant in my particular org.
There is a bit of a hivemind here, and individual thinkers are unlikely to prosper. Incompetent and toeing the party line will get you farther than making waves for improvement. Mediocrity is rewarded, while innovative thinking is a crapshoot.
There are way too many corporate initiatives, and the company is forever paying some consulting firm gadzillions of dollars to recommend one or the other course of action, but we rarely have follow-through. It keeps these initiatives from doing any real harm, but it wastes a lot of resources along the way.
