Is this a standard way to design a database?
This isn't that weird a practice.  Those are called GUIDs, or Globally Unique IDs.  The idea is that, given a GUID, you can tell exactly what piece of data the id belongs to because it will be unique everywhere.  GUIDs are best used when you will be merging different sources of similar data; for example inventory for different stores.  

I would do some research and find out as to why this is a common practice in your environment.  Maybe it's needed, maybe it's not.