Pros

Solid, stable and secure financial institution.
Experienced workforce.
Business casual dresscode.
Reasonable benefits for both part and full time staff.
Hard working, dedicated professionals.

Cons

Be prepared for lots of politics and group think (due to tenure of employment base).
Get ready to use extremely outdated technologies which are in use throughout the company.
Very limited opportunities for professional training.

Advice to Senior Management

Get out of the Dallas office once in a while, be seen in all departments, show your employees that you care by listening (in person) to their issues, and do something to help make them successful.

Pros

- Great training program and learning environment
- Advancement opportunities before recession were great
- Friendly people
- Great work life balance
- Solid & consistent feedback from management about performance

Cons

- Very outdated company, sort of like the good ole boy network
- Most employees here have an old fashioned way of thinking
- There isn't much diversity amongst higher level positions
- Depending on what department you are in it can be very tense and judgemental
- Responsibilities can be a bit overwhelming at times.

Advice to Senior Management

Develop a more up to date work environment for employees and try to shy away from the good ole boy network.

Pros

It may be somewhat hit or miss: Comerica is so broadly spread across the country that individual offices have very distinct personalities, so pay attention to the culture in the particular office you are considering as well as the overriding corpoate culture. This can also be a good thing, however, as it raises opportunities for geographic mobility within the company.

Cons

See pros: the spread of the offices means a great deal of interraction with people that you never get to develop face to face relationships with.

Advice to Senior Management

No specific advice to management at Comerica.

Pros

Work/life balance
Understanding staff
Ability to transfer to other departments

Cons

Not a great deal of professional growth
They don't develop their employees
Salaries are not competitive
Poor performance feedback

Advice to Senior Management

Train professional staff
Provide opportunities for staff to grow in their career not just their job position
Offer competitive salary packages

Pros

Comerica definitely pays more salary wise than their competitors because they seek experienced bankers rather than training new ones.

Cons

You're basically on your own 100% there as an entrepreneurial type banker because of no ad help and very little name brand recognizability. On top of that managers/assistant-managers are required to obtain product sales of their own, sometimes taking away your own customers

Advice to Senior Management

Please change it so that bankers do not have to compete with their own managers for customers.

Pros

Pay is fair and the company follows regulations and policies to a T. Very politically correct organization.

Cons

Management is extremely uncommunicative and self serving.

Advice to Senior Management

Communicate effectively with all pertinent personnel, be fair and honest with the employees.

Pros

Good training opportunities for entry level positions. Starting pay is decent and benefits are above average. Comerica allows for movement within the company so employees can move into new branches of the business and explore new oppportunities. The company has weathered the current financial storm fairly well relative to mainy of its competitors.

Cons

Many of those in middle and upper management are very stuck in their ways. In this regard the company is very inflexible and not open to new ideas and innovation. Promotions sometimes seem as if they are based on factors other than actual job performance.

Advice to Senior Management

Management needs to be more open to ideas from lower level employees.

Pros

The overall Bank tries to create a cohesive environment for its employees (supportive, team effort driven). However, wether or not the "team" approach trickles down to each individual lending unit / group is questionable.

Cons

I worked in the Entertainment Department at Comerica. The three managers there have no interest in building a team, but are much more interested in keeping relationships and contacts to themselves. They fostered an environment of overt competition between all the lenders and support staff within the group. The cutthroat lenders got referred deals by these managers, while anyone else not ruthless enough to stab their co-workers in the back were seen as dead weight, even if these lenders try to approach lending to clients in a clear, transparent manner.

It was a difficult environment to work in, simply because there was no question as to what functions everyone else (other than the three managers) serves - a cog in the managers' machine to maximize their own bonuses. Turnover in this department has been 100% every couple of years for the past five or six years, which speaks to all the above.

Advice to Senior Management

Senior Management is oblivious to bad managers. They have no interest in looking at the realities of their banking divisions employee retention records and assess whether some of these extremely high paid managers actually do anything for the bank. This is not an anomally at Comerica.

Pros

Good benefits
Long established company
Was a growing stable company before banking crisis
Casual dress environment in most offices (except for Dallas HQ)

Cons

Tooks some of the bailout money
Future unsure because of all the business they have in Detroit
Upper management not really in tune with day to day activity in the trenches

Advice to Senior Management

Don't let middle manage run wild and then act shocked when certain groups have lost money.
Need to actually lend the bailout money to borrowers instead of hoarding it.

Pros

Depth of service, care about input from employee, growth minded, excellent benefits.

Cons

Like any big company there is a corporate structure which is sometimes slow to move.

Advice to Senior Management

Continue to provide information and a clear path for employees.