Delta Dental Plan Reviews

Pros

Very good work & life balance; Delta has great benefits and coworkers are good people, nice offices, team environment.

Cons

Poor upper managment; upper management spending money wastefully on software upgrades at the expense of employee raises and bonuses. Unfair.

Advice to Senior Management

Change senior managmenet

Pros

Good benefit package. Managers and supervisors in CS are very competent.

Cons

CS operations framework is flawed. Delta is a very old company that still believes in a very autocratic form of management that points fingers at each other for any blame when really it is the overall structure of operations that needs to be changed from the top down. No one in senior management knows how to run a call center. Anyone that is highly qualified will find it very difficult to work for this company. It is so micromanaged that you can"t even send an email to your own employees without VP approval. The VP is scared of the GVP, the Directors are scared of the VP. The only way anything gets done is under the radar. Over the past three years they have had 2 managers walk out and 3 quit. If the economy was better the remaining would leave, too.

Advice to Senior Management

Hire from within for your managers and groom them. Hiring the "best" from outside Delta for operations under the current framework will never work. Experienced call center managers know that you need an open, flexible atmosphere where people are treated with respect, dignity, reward and recognition for success. A verticle structure does not work in an environment that changes day to day. Value creativity and innovation even though you are in an alignment. Fear and intimidation never works in any operation and has never been successful in the long term. And finally, assess your senior leadership now, replace them with some great people that are out there now looking for jobs and create a framework worthy of the great Delta standard of other business units within the organization.

Pros

The company is very secure and there are many employees that have been around for numerous years. Once you get here it could be a place that you stay for the rest of your career.

Cons

The company is littered with old school management that has a strong resistance to change. The mind set of too many managers and executives is, "This is the way we have always done it". Which makes for many intense and unnecessary political battles.

Advice to Senior Management

Listen to new ideas and stop putting every group in a silo. There are very bright people that work for you and their are ways to change the company in the direction Executive management wants to go.

Pros

The managers and supervisors of operations in all areas are very competent and work extremely well with each other. There is clear communication and they all work towards the common goal.

Cons

The VP of operations is a tyrant to work for. He is well educated, however, lacks the necessary skills to manage people. He believes in focusing on his teams weakness instead of their strengths. I believe he treats his staff this way because his VP treats him in the same manner. The leaders do not fully understand the basics of their operations which tends to make them be micro-managers instead of letting their team do the jobs they were hired for.

Advice to Senior Management

I would advise all Senior Management at Delta Dental up to the CEO to take a serious look at the SVP's, VP's and Directors they have running the organization. I have worked for many organizations and have never encountered leaders who lack leadership skills on effective communication, team building and who do not understand the basics of the business they lead. I would also recommend that the Board take a closer look as to how the CEO is running the corporation and how he is spending money in regards to projects. Given the current financial state of Delta, it would seem major projects need to be reevaluated. My final bit of feedback is that Delta Dental has an opportunity to be a highly successful, but in order to do so, they need to get rid of the "old boy" network and bring in new leadership to run the organization at all levels. The board should seriously consider this.

Pros

Delta Dental is a great place to work if you you're nearing retirement or don't mind doing the same thing for more than a few years. You can definitely maintain a flexible schedule with telecommuting and flexible hours. Workload is rarely heavy. Plenty of other people with little to do, who are willing to go take a 30-minute coffee break, about 4 times a day.

Cons

Middle management is terrible and changes frequently. There is little recognition for accomplishments, and you don't feel like you're making any impact on the company even when your personal accomplishments seem good. There is a lot of politics involved, and your relationship with a manager is more likely to make your life easy than hard work. There are definitely some competent engineers, but they are not the majority. Performing a task that requires knowledge from others can be quite difficult because people try to hang on to the little information they have to guarantee job security. There are people who have been there for over 20 years, and can't even claim their single useful attribute to be "having people skills".

Advice to Senior Management

Take a closer look at the reports you get from middle management. You'll notice that only a few lines change every week. It has become stale.
Don't spend millions on third-party software and then believe that your huge team of lazy engineers is going to customize it to your liking. Either pay for a full solution, or develop it in-house.