Guardian Life Reviews

Pros

Stable company with lot of work opportunities.

Cons

People are slow and reluctant to changes.

Advice to Senior Management

Need strong, skilled and motivated leadership.

Pros

New CEO is a visionary with great business sense.

Cons

All changing cultures come with their challenges. Not everyone buys into the new vision.

Advice to Senior Management

Continue to do what you're doing. Operational excellence work is paying off.

Pros

- Good benefits
- Reasonable compensation
- Generally a pleasant place to work

Cons

Change in senior management brought in a number of "Black belt" bean counters. Numerous long term employes let go without cause. CEO talks about how the Guardian values its employees. The remaining executives justify their jobs through "cost savings" aka more people being fired.

Pros

Good food in the cafeteria.
Good location of office.
Easy commute.
Good people to work with at the non-management level.

Cons

No loyalty shown towards loyal employees. Management only looking out for themselves. Don't care who they throw under the bus, as long as it's not them! Like pulling teeth trying to get an answer from someone. Long-term employees retire and then come back as Consultants because they're the only one who knows their job.

Advice to Senior Management

Be more open to lower-level employees. Don't let loyal employees leave or be forced out by co-workers looking out to cover up for their incompetence.

Pros

Most areas experience a favorable work/life balance. 401K is quite good compared to other companies. Benefit package was historically very good, however, each year it gets progressively worse.

Cons

Very poor leadership and direction. Timey communication to employees is almost non-existent. Many new leaders were brought in these last 2 years and they are not well liked by the employees. There is an overall lack of trust of management.

Advice to Senior Management

an extremely high turnover when the economy and job market improves.

Pros

Benefits are good. Work/Life balance is respected. Easy commute from most places. Pleasant enough atmosphere, but a little clickish in some departments.

Cons

Promotions are hard to come by. People tend to stay to themself, and if you are not in with the right group of people you will not get ahead.

Advice to Senior Management

Stop the constant change of senior management. You are losing some of your best people for the sake of the dollar.

Pros

Guardian provides great work/life balance. In the areas I have worked in, Management has been very supportive and provided me opportunities to grow professionally.

Cons

Some people are resistant to change.

Pros

-Cheap, high quality food in the cafeteria
-Plenty of empty conference rooms where you can contact your recruiter to get you out!

Cons

-Company NEEDS to upgrade their technology ASAP (They're stuck in the 90's -- No Microsoft Outlook... really?)
-Need to upgrade their facilities --Bathrooms are gross, carpets are stained and coming up, elevator floors creaks, antique appliances in the pantry (might be good for The Antique Roadshow), etc
-No free coffee/tea
-The commute to the office is horrendous
-The people are weirdos. It seems as if they hire the people that other companies turn down.

Pros

Good people to work with aside from politics

Cons

Promotions and raises are non existent, except the annual 1.5% when premiums go up at least 10%....you lose

Advice to Senior Management

Invest in your employees, it would help tremendously! Morale is down, i can't even tell you how many times I have heard be happy you have a job

Pros

This company has good benefits and certain divisions have better products than others.

Cons

Management tends to be remote.