Good pay, (theoretically) lots of paid time off, horrific workplace culture - Claims Service Representative GEICO Employee Review

- Easy to get "stuck" - At some point if you haven't been promoted, you'll simply be viewed as a failed associate. There is no attempt to determine the cause of the issue, or work around situations where an employee's numerical "rating" is misleading. Promotion is SOLELY determined by your numeric ranking in several areas. The number value for each area is sometimes truly indicative of performance, and sometimes not. GEICO fully acknowledged this when I brought it up but feels they get enough qualified associates to promote as-is and is not interested in changing the system. - Terrible workplace culture - Trust me, this is not my 1st call center job, and I know the difference between normal complaining from the grunts and when a large percentage of the workforce simply HATES their job. There's a lot of people working there who stay solely for the (very good) paycheck but loathe every second they are there. Management does an "Associate Opinion Survey" every two years to get feedback on employee morale, and the numbers literally show employees being more and more unhappy every time it comes, but it's never resolved or even addressed. - For entry level claims/service/sales positions, you are micromanaged to an incredible degree. No cell phones at your desk, I get that. No books, radios, or anything else to "do" during rare periods of down time? Not so reasonable. 46 minute (instead of 45) lunch? That's a serious no-no that'll get you no less than 3 discussions with various bosses. And God help you if your call gets monitored and there's a talking point not addressed or the caller's issue wasn't solved completely. Even if that's not your fault, because of a system glitch, failure to communicate a new procedure to you, or someone in a completely different department causing the issue? Hey, that's not GEICO'S problem, that's YOUR problem, buddy. See what I was saying earlier about how a poor performance score might not be your fault? Many people who get promoted are those who are simply lucky enough to avoid these kinds of issues for 5-6 months and string together enough good months to get their # where it needs to be right when a posting for a promotion comes up. - Finally, what caused me to leave - There is a lot of lip service paid to operating with "uncompromising integrity" and "respecting the associate" but it's just that, lip service. Associates routinely (and flagrantly) "trick" the system or do improper workarounds to inflate their scores, or pass off a difficult issue by giving purposely bad advice, knowing that they won't get the call back and it'll be someone else's problem when the customer calls back 3 times more angry. This kind of behavior gets brought to management's attention at least 2-3 times a year, but as long as the office's overall performance is acceptable, they're not really interested in looking into it all that thoroughly. Like any other company, they'll make the changes AFTER they get a big fine from the Department of Insurance or there's some kind of PR disaster caused by associate's shenanigans. My personal experience was that I'd been in the entry-level CSR department for a little over 6 years. I was always CLOSE to having my number where it needs to be get promoted, but never quite in the top 10 or so associates out of 130 (which is what you need to be to promote). Every single supervisor I ever had agreed that I'd do a much, much better job at TA1 (the next step up) than at CSR, but until my number at CSR got high enough, that carried no weight. They're less interested in how well you can do the next job than they are how well you're doing at your current job. I noticed I was getting a lot less feedback from supervisors and management, being picked less often to do temporary alternative jobs around the office when staffing required it, and overall just being slowly iced out. Eventually I was put on a warning for being late to work 3 times over the past year. I was literally, LITERALLY 1 or 2 minutes late each time. I was never talked to about any of it before being put on the warning, so the warning was my first indication there was even a problem. A warning is basically the last step before termination, there's usually lots of discussions that happen before that. Anyways, I was told if I was even a second late into work or coming back from lunch or something, I'd be fired. I knew the writing was on the wall at that point, and when I got pulled aside to tell me I was 45 SECONDS late (due to being held up by another employee on my way back from the break room, incidentally) from lunch, they were going to have to "review my status". Seeing as I was simply delaying the inevitable by trying to stay there, I quit before I could get officially fired. That is how this company operates when someone in a position above you decides they want you to go away.