Pros
The company is consverative and usually takes calculated steps to change and improve it's operations. It is financially managed well. You are not pressured to work undue hours and feel good about leaving on time most days. It's a great place to finish out a career if you don't want to try to or have aspirations to move up in the company. As long as you do your job competently you are in a secure position for as long as you want to keep doing your specific role. The IHQ culuture allows you to manage work/life issues reasonably well though not actively making it a policy or promoting it. If you need to work from home you usually can, but you would need to secure your manager approval for regular working hours from home and possibly a re-write of your job description from HR as those are not generally on offer at time of contract.
Cons
If you are looking for career opportunities your only hope is on the Sales side of house. The company has no career development strategies nor earmarked budget to allow you to develop yourself. If you are a budget owner you can add this back in for your own development, of course with the approval of your boss, but don't expect your boss to have any serious talks about how they can help you develop your strengths. The focus is on achieving your smart goals and doing it with less budget year-on-year. As this is a US based company you have to work really hard at mantaining communciation lines with US counterparts as they generally do not keep their promises of keeping you in the communciation loop after you estabilsh you are part of the extended team they need to support. They will send you one communciation and after that return to their old ways of doing things. So, since all of key product managers are in the US this happens all the time across all of the product ranges. It also becomes frustrating when you make suggestions to improve things and since it didn't originate on their homeland they pay little attention to your concerns. It's not until a product gets put on "stop ship" that they begin to try and listen to your suggestions on what needs to be done to keep from loosing the sales pipeline that's currently in place. Also, we continue to be very poor at integrating acquistions. We simply have no proven method of how to do this successfully leading to loads of meetings and paperwork that goes round in circles. Also, we are in the beginning phase of a 3 year roll out of an Oracle ERP system that is to replace 100 separate systems across or global enterprise of companies. This is being run by IT now and they are not engaging the right users early enough in the desgin phases so we know we will be left with further customisation requests after the implementation phase because non-Zebra employees are designing our user interfaces across the work environments. In the meantime, we've are not allowed to fix existing systems that need to align to the changes we've made in our business in general because they would jeopardize the big 3 year ERP rollout of being on-time and on/under budget. This is creating additional manual processes to be undetaken and the senior management won't budge in supporting any investment in minimizing these in the meantime. Thus, morale is now being affected by a lack of concern of the extra work load being asked of certain teams. In the meantime, we've been asked to drive the stock price to double in the next 3 years or $75. So far, after two quarters, we've made only negative headway on this goal. The stock is sitting, at this posting, at $30.99, which is down from it's April 1st Q2 start of $34.53. So, a lot of work to be done yet, plus alot more expense waiting to hit the books as the ERP system launches into rollout phase one in October this year. It appears that after taking prudent measured change approaches in the past, we now are trying to change the business at break-necked speed and that is making it a totally different company to work for now.
