Hanover Insurance Reviews

Pros

benefits
work life balance
time off
flexibility
bonus program

Cons

location
older systems
long term employees not helpful

Advice to Senior Management

n/a

Pros

- Company isn't going anywhere (160 years old)
- Good Benefits

Cons

- Treated like children, all talk and no action
- Micro Managed
- Black hole - no advancement opportunities
- Schedules change with little notice, holes in the schedule are drawn from a hat to see who covers
- No time off the phones for training, or developement - must be done after hours

Advice to Senior Management

Promote from within! Get competent management who care about employee development and listen to their employees. Have some semplance of a career path. A yearly cost of living raise would be helpful to compensate for lower salaries.

Pros

The Salary and benefits were good in ccompanies in the area.omparison to other companies in the area due to limited number of insurance

Cons

Very stressful and lack of appropriate communication from Management. Management did very little to encourage a positive envireoment in a very stressful situation.

Advice to Senior Management

I would recommend treating your employees fairly and give positive as well as negative feedback to encourage employee growth for the benefit of both employee and company.

Pros

Good Compensation
Great Time Off Benefits
Local management is very competent and experienced
Pay for performance - good recognition programs
Community involvement

Cons

Systems are antiquated
Not sure if the big boss really knows how agents really feel about our systems and end product?

Advice to Senior Management

You have got to get rid of these old computer systems; I last worked on black screens in the early 90's!

Pros

- Pay is average for a recent graduate
- Good benefits
    - 6% match on 401k from start date
- Easy to request time off
- Don't have to work hard
- Opportunities if you drink the kool aid and play office politics
- Additional training encouraged
- Hanover will pay for AINS testing (INS 21, 22 & 23) and CBA training
- Work week is under 40 hours
- Visibility and opportunity to work with senior management

Cons

- Howell location
    - The office leans heavily to the right
    - Organization does not have much culture besides the political views
- Lack of opportunities for college graduates (The Worcester location has more opportunity)
- Heavy loads of "paper pushing"
    - Very boring, feels like you are working for 10 hours not 8
    - You will be asked to work OT on worthless tasks
- Lack of advanced degrees in senior management
- Have to play politics and drink the kool aid to advance
- Year end reviews lack constructive criticism
- The AINS tests are worthless if you do not plan on staying in the insurance industry
- Cafeteria lacks options and does not provide enough food (e.g. sandwich will only have one piece of ham, turkey, etc.)

Pros

They are partial to the talented and creative.
They promote community service and try to show appreciation to employees.
There is a lot of great talent in senior management and they are relatively accessible.

Cons

Middle management lacks creativity and are often out of touch with their associates.
They are big on autonomy, but the downside of that is a lack of feedback from immediate managers.

Advice to Senior Management

Strive to have more contact with associates.

Pros

good benefits
adequate pay
great employees
lower level employees are team players and great to work with

Cons

lack of communication, important information does not make it to the people that need it. Disorganized. Product seems to hide from reality. The systems are antiquated and inefficient. Money being spent on some of the current systems seems to be a waste; there comes a time when you need to start over and build something that works for the current business needs instead of trying to fix something that is never going to work for the curent and future needs of the business.

Advice to Senior Management

Take accountability, stop pointing fingers and trying to determine who did what to get us here and let's just fix the problems.

Pros

Great Benefits
Wellness Center on campus (Nurse)
Gym on campus
Great United Way Campaign
Great "extra' benefits (holiday party, etc.)

Cons

Don't mess up in the slightest - you'll hear about it
Any negative feedback given is very vague - can't fix something if you don't know what it is.

Pros

Good benefits
Generous time off
flexible schedules

Cons

Ancient computer systems are going to be the downfall of this company. Every day is a new opportunity for something to fail and instead of fixing it, management puts a band aid on it hopes it goes away. Very frustrating to go to a job where the training is inadequate at best.

Advice to Senior Management

Get rid of your computer systems and provide your employees with expert trainers instead of
web cast training and unexperienced trainers that don't what they are teaching.

Pros

Decent pay for an intern. Provided good internship experience on my resume going forward. Very nice people to work with.

Cons

There was not enough work given to me as an intern so I did not have as much of an opportunity to display my abilities.

Advice to Senior Management

Have more projects ready for interns to work on and allow them to be successful over the course of the 10 weeks.