Morningstar Reviews in Chicago, IL Area

Pros

Very flexible work environment, including reasonable hours and occasional ability to work from home. Great benefits including 6 week paid sabbatical every four years. Great people, very friendly, open environment. Management open to feedback. Ability to be entrepreneurial and develop your own career path.

Cons

Compensation is low for finance industry and equity research in particular, but this is offset by reasonable hours and other flexibility. Equity research business is young and is still building reputation particularly among institutional audience.

Advice to Senior Management

Foster long-term retention of analysts through competitive compensation and other perks. Reward analysts who stay with the company and continue to perform. Too much turnover is highly disruptive to our growth and establishing our reputation in the business.

Pros

It is a growing company.

Cons

Although they claim to be flexible, the company culture does not really promote it.

Pros

good work life balance. good benefits

Cons

open seating, it can be very political

Advice to Senior Management

eliminate the open seating. more leadership

Pros

The culture at Morningstar is very relaxed and inclusive. The rapport between employees is generally one of casual friends. You are recognized by your peers and management when you perform well. Management is very understanding when an employee needs to take time off for personal reasons.

Cons

Morningstar has a large technology base off-shore so increasingly a lot of the work has been shifted there. Compensation purely in terms of salary is not on par with competitors because of the large off shore workforce.

Advice to Senior Management

Morningstar should concentrate on growing their US business more heavily. Issues most often arise because of miscommunication or time-lag. If teams are not fragmented so much, I believe that the company would have a faster turn around on products.

Pros

Morningstar provides many opportunities for growth and advancement within the company. The people here are intelligent and really work hard to complete their goals.

Cons

Morningstar does not pay competitively. It's a great place, but the salary makes it hard to not look at positions outside the company.

Advice to Senior Management

It would be great if there was more focus on retaining talent. Some middle management should be re-evaluated and salaries across the board need to improve.

Pros

Benefits, work/life balance, sabbaticals, coworkers are nice, casual dress code, free beverages.

Cons

Salaries, employees get pressured to split up their valuable sabbatical time, turning it into normal vacations. Stability of workforce means there's not much vertical movement unless you quit and get rehired in a new spot.

Pros

Benefits include 6 week sabbatical every 4 years, open work environment, access to upper management and decentralized approach by management

Cons

Difficult advancement for finance personnel. Very limited feedback in terms of job performance. Lack of management interest in iindividual career progression, interests, etc.

Pros

It is a very good company to work for

Cons

The salary is pretty low than the industry

Pros

[1] Informal, University-like work culture

[2] Lots of collaboration and learning within teams

[3] Open communication between management and employees at most levels

Cons

Nothing that particularly stands out.

Pros

MBA Tution benefit
Good Health care
6 Week Sabbatical after 4 yrs of employment

Cons

Salary is at least 30% below Market rate. Management wont agree to this. Recently they got consultants to help them review employer salaries and benefits and found that employers are underpaid. The management always has an excuse that the company grew too fast in very short span. If that's the case then employees at Facebook, Groupon, Google should be working for free! The growth that Morningstar has seen in last 10 years, the above companies have seen 10 months. Low salary is just an excuse to get cheap untrained labor. The senior management that has been with the company for more than decade get very well paid.

Incompetent Managers - Some of the Product Managers, Team leaders are totally incompetent. Just because they have been with the company for over 10 yrs get the position.

Too much politics - No body would admit this but even a dumb person who works at Morningstar would realize that Politics is what is killing this Company.

Advice to Senior Management

If the CEO and Presidents are really serious about the success of the Company, should try to cut the politics that is chocking company.

Reward employers with salary that is at least in line with the market rate.