Complacency abounds, a few diamonds in the rough. Get in. Get experience and education. Get out.
Pros
A handful of peers and upper management were competent and intelligent people. Few were inspiring and wanted to make a real difference and fix problems. Most frontline employees were burnt out and jaded, and I can't blame them for that. Benefits are okay. Pay is less than competitive. They do pay for insurance and risk management education, but so does everyone in the industry. They give you alot of unquestioned sick days (I believe I had 40 per year when I quit), but after a year working there, you quickly realize why.
Cons
Excessive workload. Work until 9pm everyday and still put in time on weekends excessive. This was mostly driven by the horrible que system in which you were doubling as an inbound call agent (think 100+ calls a day) as well as an auto claims adjuster. If they've changed it, that would be a huge plus, but I doubt it's been done. You're an insurance adjuster handing simple to high complexity claims, but your primary KPI is "inbound calls taken" give me a break. Your insureds abuse you over the phone for not handling their claims fast enough, and then your managers pushed you to do the same when you hung up. However, there wasn't much time between calls for any meaningful managerial interaction or coaching. The old technology they use compounded the workload problem. They claims system would crash pretty regularly for half a day. When this happened you had to stay on the cue and take calls, because they didn't want customers to know there was a service interruption. You had to write down the date, time, and substance of each call, then enter then into the claim when the system came back online. As far as I know, they still use the same 20 year old claim handling system. There's no rewarding initiative, there's no rewarding people who go above and beyond or who accomplish things, there's no rewarding problem solvers. They know what the problems are, they don't care. It's far too much work to fix them. Unless you are friends or family with management, your efforts will be wasted. The culture is immature. I understand there was a "hot list" that went around the office. I understand managers were at least aware of, if not contributing to it, though I never saw it. Very high school like behaviour. Very cutthroat. Encouraged to rat out others mistakes or laziness, it was exhausting due to the overwhelimg laziness and burnout in peers. Constantly found myself fixing others mistakes for them, and having to stay late to get to my own work. My own manager was quite good, but he was often overworked. For that reason I had to walk the floor frequently when I had questions to find another manager. Invariably the first question out of their mouth was "why don't you ask your manager". It was clear they didn't want to do any more than absolutely necessary. Obviously this is all resultant of trickle down culture and an wilfully ignorant or naively incompetent and oblivious leadership team. Leadership touts their "open door" policy, but when you interact with them on an individual basis, you are very aware of how you're wasting their time. Working there felt like trying to build a house with a hammer made of playdough and nails made of icicles. Google search "Allstate lawsuits". There's a good reason their employees keep suing them.
