AstraZeneca reviews

Management was generally awful with too many layers, office politics rule the company, and work-life balance was non-existent. Complaining about the job is a frequent conversation topic, and it seems many current employees in all departments are looking for new positions, more than ever before. Many departments have a huge amount of turnover due to the poor environment. Development opportunities are only for favorite employees.

- Constant stream of layoffs has created an atmosphere of fear. Scapegoating which was unheard of a few years ago is now common, with managers throwing their reports under the bus to save their own skins. - There is a constant blame shifting atmosphere as individuals struggle to avoid responsibility for fear of being targeted in the next series of layoffs. This leads to both to scapegoating and to endless series of meetings to attempt to reach a consensus decision on almost everything. Unfortunately unless everyone agrees no one will agree and while clear cut yes/no decisions are made, decisions in the grey area are trapped in an endless series of meetings with no one willing to say yes or no. - New senior management has encouraged an extremely political atmosphere in which office politics and backstabbing are paramount. As a result the primary focus of middle management has shifted from discovering new drugs to surviving office politics. - There has been an extremely rapid series of reorganizations/business plan shifts. This is extremely disruptive. Drug development is a long process with drugs taking years to progress from discovery to the marketplace. Changing business plans every year or two doesn't work with a development process that long and just makes the pipeline problem worse. - There is a significant pipeline problem that everyone new was coming but senior management made inadequate preparations and now lower level employees are suffering while the senior level people who made the bad decisions are leaving with very golden parachutes.