Pros
I absolutely loved working for 3M. There is this pride that I would say most employees have working for them because it is such a good company and you get to work on some really cool products that are used every day all over the world. In my personal experience, I always knew my management team had my back and they were excellent coaches and mentors, which can be hard to come by. I was able to work autonomously and create projects I wanted to work on and It was easy to get the resources you needed whether it was in the plant, through sister plants, or though their intracompany website (which is the only company I’ve worked for that I would say had a useful one). In my plant, the systems rarely made intuitive sense, but they worked and we did quite well as far as OTIF and Customer Service levels were concerned, so you could only make things better and more efficient, which is a great position to be in. Lastly, my coworkers were just down to earth. While you always will have the negative folks in any workplace, most people I worked with knew what their goals were and just wanted to achieve them with as little mellow drama as possible and get paid (which 3M also does well).
Kontras
3M is a baby boomer dressed in millennial's clothing. On the outside they seem really hip and trendy, but you soon learn the inner workings of the company are still that of a behemoth Fortune 500 company; change is hard to push and there is a lot of red tape to get some things approved. My main complaint would be the lack of vacation days provided from the start. I've worked for a lot of different multinational corporations; the ones that are competitive for great employees give at least 3 weeks’ vacation to start with. But, I actually had to give up a week of my vacation time when I joined 3M as they would not negotiate this outdated norm that new employees should only have 2 weeks to start with. This was actually one of my main reasons for leaving the company, as I live across the country from where my family is and I did not get to see them as much as I had before because travel times were just too long to get back home within a 2-3 day weekend. I worked for 3M for over 2 years, and I would have had to wait another 2 just to get that 3rd week. I did get a month of sick days, but I was not allowed to use them for medical appointments, which in 2019 I happened to have a lot of. So, I had to use my vacation time for these. The one time I got to go home in 2019 was for my grandmother's funeral, and I had to beg for 2 days of bereavement leave instead of the allowed 1 to compensate for the travel. I’m not looking for sympathy, I just find it perplexing that a company that says it is as socially responsible as they say they are has not kept up with the times on this policy. I left for a similar sized, well respected company that gave me 3 weeks right off the bat with an additional week of flex holidays. If it weren’t for this con, I would have loved to stay with 3M.