Novartis reviews

4.0

80% would recommend to a friend

(9,041 total reviews)
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Vas Narasimhan

86% approve of CEO

70% positive business outlook

Novartis has an employee rating of 4.0 out of 5 stars, based on 9,041 company reviews on Glassdoor which indicates that most employees have a good working experience there. The Novartis employee rating is in line with the average (within 1 standard deviation) for employers within the Pharmaceutique et biotechnologie industry (3.7 stars).

Reviews by job title

9K reviews
3.0
Feb 5, 2009
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Novartis is a place where if you work hard and play the political games there are significant opportunities. It is a growing company with a strong research and development pipeline. The people, by and large, are good, honest and hard working. Novartis has previously invested significantly in training and development programs for its staff and if you push yourself there are many career development pathways to follow. They have a history in niche product portfolio's and have shown they have the ability to launch products with reasonable success. Sadly Australia is far from the thoughts of global leaders of the company and currently the PEC appears to be out of contact with their customers and employees - they talk a great deal about being externally focussed but in reality they are a company that is overly internally focussed and bureaucratic with massive administration load for sales people the focus making "Big Brother" reporting the priority.

Cons

Honesty and integrity are not the strong points of some of the senior leadership and unfortunately there is a large number of people wanting to make it too the top no matter what the consequences. They have significant medicines australia compliance issues and a culture in management of what can I get away with rather than what is in accordance with the code of conduct. The approach is very bureaucratic and report driven so much so that I would say 40% of a sales reps time is caught up in administrative tasks - for which there is no support as there are no state offices or home office allowances. They operate under the motto of do "more with less" and pay rates are below industry standards when compared to global organisations of a similar size.

2.0
Feb 2, 2009
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

It can be a place to start getting experience in the IT field.

Cons

This could be a problem with any large corporation, but it can feel like there is little or no forward progress when working on projects. IT only gets in trouble when it delivers something, so many old and ineffective programs stay in place because there isn't much motivation to get things done. There is always big talk about the next project, but most of the time nothing comes from it.

2.0
Jan 30, 2009
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Novartis dedicates a lot of time, money, and effort into training their employees. I had a total of seven weeks of professional sales and product training that were all done away from home. I hired right out of college and given a company car, a corporate credit card, a fantastic salary for a 22 year old, and excellent benefits. Novartis even paid for 5 sessions of counseling when I was going through some personal trouble. I saw and did things while working a Novartis that I wouldn't have been able to do any where else. My first day on the job I was flown to Vegas for a large meeting. I went to Vegas twice, met the cast from Organ County Choppers, met Joe Montana, met another famous basketball player, and got a picture and an autograph from all three.

Cons

Becuase Novartis is such a large company it is easily for employees to get lost in the machine. Your personal sales bonus was determined by how hard your coworkers work more than your own. In other words, eight of us had to work to reach a certain sales goal so that we could get our sales bonus. But if three people were not working at all of if they quit and there were vacancies in the team, we would still be held to the same sales goals. Novartis applied a "one size fits all" sales model all over the US. We was frustrating because if something worked well in Dallas it must work well in Seattle, even if it clearly didn't. When this was brought to upper managements attention nothing was done about it. Additionally Novartis expected you to do about 10 to 15 hours of administrative clerical work a week, but you were not allowed to do the work between the hours of 8 and 5 because at that time you were supposed to be in the field making sales calls. On top of that you were expected to do approximately five late night dinner programs a month on your own time, This crushed any work/life balance. I left Novartis by choice. I was not fired or pushed out so none of what I said comes from unresolved bitterness. These are the reasons why I chose to leave.

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