Complaint Review: Neumann Homes - Joliet Illinois

I worked for Neumann Homes for 3 years, and it was a gruelling, thankless job. You were expected to do extra curricular things to " help support your fellow team members". Most of the time it was 3-4 hrs of wasted time. Neumann spent a lot of money utilizing " mind tools " to try to motivate their employees, and all the while paying them below area standards. In 1 year I watched 20 people in a division of 77 either quit or be fired. Upper management in our division continuously watched for " scapegoats " in order to keep their jobs. Our land aquisition manager made several costly (thousands) mistakes and his punishment was the firing of a land super who knew their job and had documented all the mistakes, and not 1 but 2 promotions. When employees bonused on a regular basis, management restructured the bonus program to make it a nearly unattainable goal. Alot of people depended on those bonuses to offset the health insurance costs. Bonuses were nonexistant after the restructure. Employee evaluations were a joke because you had to kiss some serious butt to even earn a 4% increase. Most employees ended up wih a 2 or 3%, based on salary. Other companies were offering superintendent positions with a 10-15,000 dollar increase with better gas incentives. Whenever you tried to leave the company, or several people started leaving, Ken Neumann would call upon his legal team and send out nasty letters to his competition, threatening lawsuits to anyone hiring a Neumann employee. Needless to say, the moral was terrible, and they always pushed and pushed to make their closings. They were also famous for waiting until the last possible minute to inform a homeowner that they would not be closing, sometimes leaving homeowners stuck with extra hotel and storage expenses, which eventually. They would reimberse. After constant hounding. I watched good construction people leave, people who knew what they were doing and knew how to build a good home, and their replacement was what management sought after....fresh out of college kids with barely any experience in construction... but proud to wear khaki and utilize gestappo-like tactics to make their tradesmen do as much for free as possible. I also seen a 12%, across the board decrease in material and labor, demanded by Neumann himself, only to then increase home prices, not once but twice, in that same year. Beware, they are houses built in assembly line fashion with inexperienced people doing quality control. All the employees care about is getting the hell out of Neumann's clutches. And all the ones I have seen since escaping, have made themselves better by doing it.

From an employee prospective, Neumann Homes doesn't give a crap about the homes that they have built or their employees. The employees there are treated so badly and are often made to work through almost every holiday. I was a contractor at the company for about two months and it was a horrifying experience. I worked in HR and they were constantly firing employees or dealing with personnel who would quit on a minute's notice. With this in mind, I would often hear negative talk about the company from many of the employees. They would often mention they themselves would never buy a house from Neumann Homes even with the 3% employee discount. They go through employee home salespeople like a bowling ball goes through 10 pins - always being threatened and fired on a minutes notice. The salespeople are paid on a draw and sometimes get no check at all. I also saw the owner's wife at times - she was a complete b**ch to the employees and would often drop things on the floor purposely in front a male employee just to see if he would pick it up. I noticed when this happened, she would always stand in back of the employee as he picked the item up, for obvious reasons. If the person didn't pick up whatever she dropped, she would get furious to run and tell her husband. The whole thing made me want to s**t myself. Whtever happened to "Honor thy Husband?" The home superintendents who worked on the homebuilding site did not often want to go and work outside during bad weather. They would sit in their trucks, drink coffee, and basically blow each other to stay warm. This is probably why you didn't see the trades fixing things when they needed to.........