Where do I start..... most of the negative reviews from earlier this year and 2017 are pretty spot-on. 'The Death of Insurance' is a great title, wish I thought of that one myself. Get rid of half of all the middle management and the company would be fine? That statement is 100% true. More than half actually. This isn't totally blaming the middle managers - it's the fact that senior management let it get this bad. Come to think of it, I'm not sure who in senior management actually knows the ins and outs or the day-to-day life of a real insurance company. So the problem trickles down from there.
You have senior managers who have never underwritten an account or talked to a broker in their life. So many VPs who just schedule meetings in order to discuss another meeting, to set up another week-long trip across the country to have other meetings with other useless VPs - expensing flights, nice hotels & meals, etc. Then to get back to their home office and have meetings to go over the meetings they had off-site.... it's a never ending cycle of bs. But then they'll get mad at you if you expense a lunch with a broker once in a while. Or if you have the nerve to ask for more than their standard 3% cost of living salary increase.
It's hard to underwrite when your bosses are just studying your every move in Salesforce. There's a shared queue for you and other underwriters, it's impossible to sort or track the emails, so there will be hundreds and hundreds of emails in no particular order. Then when a broker gets mad that you haven't responded, if your boss finds out then you get reprimanded. Talk about Big Brother watching you - it's worse than that. Say you get up to grab water from the kitchen and talk to somebody, then get back to your desk 5 minutes later. If someone from the call center sent you a few messages to take a broker call and you didn't answer, then it's a big deal and 4 middle managers are sent an email, then they'll remind you to make sure to set your status to away anytime you get up from your desk.
When brokers call or email, they don't have your direct number so everything goes to a centralized call center. This frustrates 99% of brokers, because they can never get in touch with the person who worked on their account, or the person they are familiar with, etc. Brokers are assigned case numbers to reference (which is pointless) and this makes them more frustrated. Again most of these SVPs / VPs (titles are thrown out like candy here) have not been in a client facing or insurance related position before, so they think this method is a great idea.
Even after all the bad reviews and customer complaints - the Distinguished way is to always say everything is 'wonderful,' 'amazing' or 'incredible.' If you ever say something negative or give constructive criticism, then you're ostracized and looked at as a problem. Unless you're one of the favorites, and then you can do no wrong. This is a common theme.
Some of the IT kids are nice, but the websites and systems for the brokers are constantly broken. Yet these guys take 2 hour lunches, come in late, play video games in their special IT room.... i don't blame them, if management allows this to happen. This might be the largest department at Distinguished right now, but the systems are still always messed up. Managers from other departments will act like everything is awesome and there are no problems, so you can't mention to anyone that there are system issues.
They used to have an annual "Culture Week" outing that cost probably $1,000,000 where they send all 200 or so employees to an off-site retreat around the country for 4 days of team building. These were actually fun, except when you had to catch up on your work before & after since literally the whole company wasn't working. Another thing that brokers would complain about. Actually there were a couple employees whose main role with the company seems to be just the planning of culture week.
I can keep going but I think you get the point.
