Kleinfelder was well known for its commitment to its employees. It was a respected geotechnical and environmental engineering firm with a strong presence in the Western US and long-term relationships with local clients. The company ambitiously expanded operations nationwide through growth and acquisition, with reasonable success. The company could boast of its remarkably low turnover rate and the longevity of its employees. Many, many individuals had been with the firm for ten, twenty, even thirty years. I knew several people who had never worked for another firm. These are the reasons I joined Kleinfelder.
Notice that all the verbs are in the past tense. Around 2008, the company changed its leadership and its strategic direction. The company's stated goal became to multiply revenue by a factor of five, to a billion dollars a year. This was to be accomplished within five years by morphing into an engineering design firm, and would be implemented by re-branding, strategic hires, reorganization, organic growth, aggressive acquisition, entry into unfamiliar markets, and new relationships with clients that represented potential multimillion dollar annual revenues.
Kleinfelder made the conscious decision to forego the opportunities in the local markets that had been its bread and butter, in preference for huge national and international customers. There was no safety net, no Plan B. In fairness, the company succeeded in winning an impressive number of contracts with very large clients. However, the revenues represented by these wins did not offset the loss of revenue from the company's customary work in local markets. Backlog disappeared and the layoffs commenced. Too late, the company realized that transition from a well-respected firm that was "local everywhere" to a nationally-recognized design firm didn't work out as expected. Management decided to pour large amounts of capital into local marketing efforts to recapture clients who had been neglected for the preceding five years. It didn't work very well.
The core of the company is gone. Employees who had been with the firm for twenty years and more were fired or allowed to leave (or encouraged to leave). Good customers were lost. What's left is a "me too" design firm with world-wide aspirations and no name recognition, that is led by management that has never accomplished anything remotely like the firm's stated goals, and doesn't know how.
Despite assertions to the contrary, employees are no longer valued. Loyalty is no longer valued. Only shareholder equity matters, although the organization is curiously inefficient. While the company boasts of a "flat structure", the fact is that this company of 1800 employees has not only a CEO, a COO, and a CFO, but also a chief technical officer (CTO), a chief information officer (CIO), a chief counsel, and dozens of vice presidents and direct owners. To support all this management bloat, utilization goals of 95 percent are the norm. Management spins the condition of the firm as a result of a bad economy, and that the firm's competitors are operating the same way, with similar results. It's unclear whether management actually believes this, but the rank-and-file certainly don't.
The various personality flaws of individual managers won't be discussed, but one anecdote will illustrate the cultural issues at the top of the organization. One manager, during the keynote address at a company-wide technical gathering (attended by nearly 1000 employees), displayed incredible insensitivity when he likened the company's new strategic vision to the Spaniards' conquest of the New World. He stated that the Conquistadors' success could be attributed to Cortez' decision to "burn the boats", which was intended to signify that there would be no going back to Kleinfelder's old business model. I could only imagine what employees of Native American heritage felt at that moment. Unbelievably, the same manager reprised the "burn the boats" comment at the same gathering one year later.
Kleinfelder was once a wonderful place to work in a genuine family atmosphere. Now it is just another engineering company that wishes to be a juggernaut, but bears more resemblance to the Titanic.
