American Express Reviews in Phoenix, AZ Area

Pros

Good experience builder and company is well structured to support your work.
Virtual jobs are always nice

Cons

26 pay checks instead of 24 or 12
Lower salaries than top bank competitors. Very cheap with bonuses.
Promotions from within have a salary increase cap of 15%
External candidates come in with higher salaries than those promoted from within.
Promotion from within is political, especially to B40 and up.

Advice to Senior Management

Get rid of your bad leaders. If there is smoke there is fire. Listen to the Ombuds person.

Pros

Amex has good on boarding process. Managers believe in promoting employees to strive to better heights with the organization

Cons

some business units work in silos. The management team as a whole is not always on the same page. Company changes do not always flow down to support teams.

Pros

Benefits, smart interesting co-workers, flexible work/family life schedule and dress code, telecomuting.

Cons

Highly politicized, too afraid to venture out of the blue box and everyone afraid to speak up about it

Advice to Senior Management

Offshoring jobs to India was not such a great idea when you had plenty of qualified USA citizens

Pros

Great co-workers, telecommuting opportunities, multiple locations throughout the world. American Express used to be a great place to work, however over the past few years quality no longer mattered,

Cons

Middle management lack integrity and ethics. Many senior leaders look the other way when they know things are occurring. Poor healthcare benefits, no options. Continual layoffs. Corporation provides better benefits and incentives to different departments.

Advice to Senior Management

Read the understand the Blue Box Values and believe in them and listen to your employees. Eliminate managers that are causing you to lose great employees with long standing careers.

Pros

The work life benefits are very good. There is nice flexibility to be able to have a decent balance. The onsite cafeteria is a nice touch.

Cons

The way employees receive "ratings" is flawed and insulting and a company as respected as American Express should be ashamed that this is what is done. If a cardmember senses that you are a minority, you have an accent, or your name is "American" enough, you will get poor ratings losing money and holiday options. And while these rating numbers are deemed as the ultimate determination as to schedule and promotions, cronyism and favoritism seem to trump them.

Advice to Senior Management

Too many leaders are so worried about keeping their jobs, they don't do their jobs. American Express certainly makes numerous errors in execution, technology, and fulfillment, yet puts those errors on the backs of its employees with its onerous "RTF" metric which punishes.

Pros

Challenging work, great opportunities, excellent coworkers

Cons

This is a wonderful company, I have been here for 8 years and still love it.

Advice to Senior Management

None

Pros

People are great, love having cafeteria onsite

Cons

Lack of training, too much busy work, delegation diarhea- FTEs found any and every conceivable way to delegate work responsibilities to someone else mainly contractors- Plausible deniability syndrome

Advice to Senior Management

Become leaders, stop the high school cliques and hold employees accountable, stop the jump through hoops for the sake of it

Pros

American Express has excellent benefits and growth opportunities given the right access point to the organization. They are open to individual's ideas and allowing them to bring it forward.

Cons

Entering through the wrong access point may leave you in a "black hole" unable to move in the organization limiting growth opportunities.

Advice to Senior Management

My advice would be to recognize the strengths of employees and, if the strength is outside of that area, sincerely work to help them grow/move.

Pros

They recognize work life balance and employee education.

Cons

Yearly performance review process, they do forced ranking. It was a big problem with high performance team and multi-year initiatives.

Advice to Senior Management

More accountability and responsibility. Performance management of multi-year initiatives

Pros

The pay and your fellow full time units. Management at all levels can't even do your job yet they tell you how to do it. The can't even use the software.

Cons

Management says they care but they don't. Were are known as FTU. Which stands for Full Time Unit. 3 years JD Power best cust service and we got a muffian and juice. How much di Ken Chenualt and his management get? A lot morte I'm sure. Like they need the extra money.

Advice to Senior Management

If you say you care then do it. The cut medical and stuck us with the stupid medical savings account.