Allianz Life Reviews

Pros

Benefits were decent at Allianz Life.

Cons

Sr Management had too many differing personal agendas not related to overall success of the company.

Advice to Senior Management

Clean House; Leadership in management should focus on success of the company not personal agendas. Too much of a gap between G Bhojwani and his SR leadership.

Pros

This is an amazing company to work for. We work really hard but we also have time for fun and personal development. We are encouraged to volunteer and support our communities. 95% of our employees recently participated in an Engagement Survey. 83% of all respondents said they agree or strongly agree that Allianz is a great workplace. Management takes this data seriously and takes corrective actions when needed. We not only survived the financial crisis but thrived. How many companies can say that?

Cons

In some of our departments, Operations/IT, it is difficult to fully participate in all the opportunities available due to workload and because many of these jobs are customer focused, phone based roles that required people to be at their desks.

Advice to Senior Management

Keep doing what you're doing. 99% of us say we are heading the right direction.

Pros

Training and development. Benefit package

Cons

moving ahead or getting support from management

Pros

Comfortable environment; very little or no office politics, which is very valuable; plenty of room for professional development; it has a comfortable enough atmosphere for one to ask questions

Cons

Low pay to interns (though that's normal in Malaysia)! Located in the heart of Kuala Lumpur; thus traffic jams are unavoidable and it's a pain commuting to and fro

Advice to Senior Management

Try to include more resources in the office such as books for computer programming, methodology, etc. Interns should be allowed to use the internet for extra resources as well

Pros

This is a fairly low-stress environment with an extensive training program, the facilities are nice and there are a lot of good people working there. The pay is neither high nor low.

Cons

They hire big batches of temps and invest a lot in training, but let people go on a daily basis for infractions that permanent employees are able to get away with; as a temp your performance has to be pretty much perfect or you are let go, which is rather unsettling - the temp agency you are working through gives you a call in the morning and tells you to just not come back. There are way too many managers, and I found the one I had to be quite incompetent and sort of a chicken.

Advice to Senior Management

There are too many managers; there are highly competent people working under them who bail them out. I'd suggest thinning the management ranks. Also, after investing all that time/money in training, allow temps time to achieve perfection rather than just letting them go.

Pros

pays pretty well, professional environment, steady reliable place to work, and if your really ambitious...there is opportunity to grow within your position.

Cons

Metric goals are set high and if you don't meet them on a consistent basis...your fired! Also, the rules changes frequently as to what you are scored for, which often makes it difficult to stay consistent with certain things. The environment is quite negative right now, because you don't feel valued and people get let go all the time.

Advice to Senior Management

Upper management needs to start firing some of their managers for bad performance instead of their employees, because managers have responsibility for their employees success. I think if Managers felt they also had the risk of loosing their jobs, they might do their jobs better.

Pros

Nice building, but extremely poor leadership. Have made a couple leadership changes in the last year - finally got rid of Oliver Bussman as CIO, unfortunate for SAS as he is now their CIO.

Cons

Majority in management are there for themselves with no plans on being there for more than 2-3 years. Spend months and months and thousands of dollars trying to get projects off the ground and then they let them flounder. Unable to complete projects and have extremely high IT process overhead.

Advice to Senior Management

Get rid of all of the IT red tape. Hire a competent HR leader, sales manager and CEO. Stop hiring based on filling equal opportunity quotas and instead, hire the best talent.

Pros

Met some great people, couldn't ask for a better work/life balance, low stress. If you care about your job and career, work hard, and are friendly to people you will be successful and enjoy the company. Great for recent grads to get some business experience.

Cons

I felt like I wasn't going anywhere career-wise. Not much room for advancement with this economy/industry. Everyone is at a stand-still and was probably going to sit in the same desk making the same money for another 5 years. Some people in Ops have been doing the same thing for over 20 years. No thank you!

Advice to Senior Management

Compliment your employees when they do a great job, it takes 2 seconds to say "nice job" - offer a little more career guidance if possible. It's nice to know you are going places in life.

Pros

The pay is competitive. The benefits are okay. They match well with other companies. They promote employees within the company.

Cons

Allianz has changed drastically since it merged. It used to be a small company that gave great bonuses, had great pay and a lot of opportunity. None of the above is still in tact.

Advice to Senior Management

Stop taking so much from Fireman's fund. When companies merge a little of both worlds should be adapted. This hasn't been happening.

Pros

The salary was competitive for the job title. Co-workers worked together as a team and were supportive.

Cons

Management was non communicative and ill run. Morale of employees went progressive downhill as things got worse and worse with the financial crisis of 2008 with no support from mid or upper level management. The ops jobs are being outsourced to temps and overseas.
I trained the $9 an hour temps, who little did I know were to replace me once I was laid off.

Advice to Senior Management

Tell your employees the truth. Try to be introspective and consider how you can help the situation instead of passing the blame and simply hiring cheaper and cheaper labor who do not know what they are doing to replace the ones with experience that cost a bit more. You will save money and productivity in the long run.