Safeco Reviews

Pros

Very intelligent people throughout the company. Work Life balance is what you make of it and management is flexible with where you work if you're good at what you do. This is a great place with good career advancement opportunities.

Cons

As with many of the other insurance companies out there, this isn't a high tech company and the methods and technologies used may seem like this business is being run in the 90's.

Pros

Good pay, learn a lot, fast paced and never boring, no micro managing

Cons

too much work for the time given, lots of overtime with no overtime pay due to being salary. There are a lot of meetings which take away time from getting work done.

Advice to Senior Management

show some support by taking phone calls to help the team

Pros

Location of the office.
Easy commute.
Nice building to work in.
Great co-workers.
Very flexible with time schedule for vacations.

Cons

Understaffed. Excessive amount of work placed on. Very difficult to maintain a work/life balance. Many employees work late or come in on the weekends to catch up. No overtime.

Pros

-Coworkers (misery really loves company)

Cons

-Unreasonable amount of pending files
-Upper management continues to implement baffling procedures

Pros

Promotions are available if you work for them. Take charge of your career path, you can with this company, you will get back what you put into it.

Cons

Typical of any office setting you can see some management allows petty behavior.

Advice to Senior Management

None

Pros

Competitive Benefit Package since Liberty Mutual purchased Safeco in 2008 (PTO, 401k, Pension).
Involved in many rewarding high level projects. High caliber of coworkers.

Cons

IT Department has most projects go live before they are ready and they end up having to pull back, correct and redo. Heavy workloads, frequent overtime expected. Too much micro management. With so many long term employees, a lost sense of reality on seeing norms in the industry outside of the old company ways that need to change in order to keep up.

Advice to Senior Management

Top down communication strong, but openness to reverse is poor. Upper management needs to listen to the employees more on the internal intricacies in order to execute strong ideas more fluidly. Too much concern with the speed of change, and not enough attention to the quality of change. Current internal friction still remains 3 years after merger between legacy Safeco versus legacy Agency Markets employees. Some of the management is still having emotional difficulties with having been purchased and is stubbornly resisting this change to doing some things better. Would like to see them manage more with their minds over their emotions and realize Safeco was fortunate to having been purchased over perished.

Next question error - Paula Reynolds is no longer leading Safeco and left a few years ago, Mike Hughs has been the new CEO for a few years now.

Pros

Flexible work hours
Decent work life balance
Many very long term employees
Nice offices

Cons

Salary lower than market
Management split between Indianapolis (Liberty Mutual) and Seattle (Safeco)
Policy admin systems antiquated

Advice to Senior Management

Need to put together a coherent roadmap to refresh the mainframe technology and integrate with LM. Technology leadership is needed, can't just respond to business unit demands with a 1 year time horizon.

Pros

As a field adjuster I got to set my owe schedule
Able to work out of my home
The company picked up the cost of internet access for my home

Cons

Territory too large for number of claims expected to see. Poor work/life balance.
micro management. Team leaders nit-pick files
no room for advancement
Pay is under the industry standards
Since Lib Mut took over, they have stripped Safeco of everything that once made it a good place to work.
Moral is horrible. Not one adjuster is happy. All over worked, stressed out.

Advice to Senior Management

Stop trying to micro manage the adjusters. You hired them for a reason - you believed they were capable and qualified to do the job - let them do it.
Either reduce the claims load or go back to paying overtime for the claims adjusters. Just because you eliminated paying overtime does not mean the work went away. Most all adjusters are still working the same amount of overtime as before, but now they are doing it for free.

Pros

People are great, good advancement

Cons

Expectations are high and tough for some people, but if you work you will be fine.

Pros

Very supportive of family life and flexible on schedule. The projects were outstanding to be involved in and you could be very creative with solutions.

Cons

No real direction overall especially from the Cheif Information Officer. Priorities between Information Systems and other departments rarely were in line, which created big issues.

Advice to Senior Management

Priorities need to be resolved.