Pros

Great fellow employees who are very supportive

Cons

Imcompetent Sr and local Management and Supervisors. Nationwide used to be a pretty good place to work until being taken over by the Allied Management. They have one thing on their mind and that is to downsize to a default. One person who stated " They do not value input from anyone over 45 yrs old" is very typically correct. For the seasoned Insurance Professional, Nationwide is like going back to Kindergarten. One one hand your told that your a professional Insurance counselor and on the other hand you are treated like a child with lack of respect, condesending remarks and bombarded with unrealistic goals by those at the supervisory and management level. The morale is in the toilet, at least at this particular office. All goal attainment is now attempted by threat tactics. Your are forced to attempt to call current customers 7 or 8 times within a 6 month period to go over their policies with them. My experience is that 95% of them consider this to be badgerment. Working there is much like working in boiler room/call center environment, non of which fosters a professional working environment. On top of all this they force you to be licensed in 45 different states and expect you to keep abrest of all the daily changes for all the states. Their software tools are old, antiquated and anything new in the way of tools is simply a band aid on top of what they already have to work with. The management seems to value mostly the employee with a drone/worker bee mentality that never speaks up and just shuffles along from day to day. If you are looking for a challenging rewarding career with upward mobility for those of any age I would highly reccomend planing on living in either Des Moines, Iowa or Columbus, Ohio as this local office has little to nothing to offer you.

Advice to Senior Management

Decide which you wish to be, an Insurance Company or a Bank! Immediately establish weekly focus groups with all your employees and let them speak freely with out fear of reprisal. Take a look at that fact you have some real problems with some of your local management and supervisors as far as attitude, knowledge of Insurance is concerned. Stop padding the pocket books of only the Sr. level management at the Home Office level while allowing the folks out in the trenches to financially flounder. Begin to realize that you cannot become number one when your employee morale is 10 feet below sealevel. You badly need to start staffing your local management with seasoned insurance professionals in lieu of people with call center backgrounds who have no idea what a basic tool like a "broker of record letter" is. It would be good to wake up and realize that the best employees you had are the folks that now work for someone else!