Time Warner Reviews

Pros

Time Inc....great editorial product, good benefits, appealing environment, competitive compensation In a field that has several more bad years to come before it bottoms out.

Cons

Time Inc. Cost cutting and downsizing for approximately eight years now. Senior TW mgmt. is clearly not going to invest but probably divest.

Advice to Senior Management

Its time to make the hard decisions

Pros

The Benefits are great and you get a good length of vacation time.

Cons

Lack of acknowlegement and compensation. Assistants are the least paid and the most overworked. No bonus. Too much politics among managers. No room for advancement.

Advice to Senior Management

Listen to your staff. Get out and speak to people in the company. Know what your managers are doing/not doing and how they are handling their teams.

Pros

Great benefits that you have to pay for, but not bad - if you ever have time to use them.

Cons

Everyone asks you to fix their cable or get them free cable even though your job has nothing to do with that end of the business.

Advice to Senior Management

Look at how many hours your employees work and either cut back hours or adjust pay to be commensurate with those crazy hours.

Pros

Great company with good benefits. The company is very diverse with many different products. Should be recession proof - we all need to have fun these days.

Cons

Change happens too slowly, costs cuts are always aimed at headcount rather than common sense cuts. Too often the lower paid employees get cut rather than the higher paid executives.

Advice to Senior Management

Look at the actual costs not the number of employees. Cuttting heads but not the workload is not a good combination and leads to loss of morale. Employees are supposed to be our number 1 asset, we need morale to be high.

Pros

the people, benefits and opportunities to learn and grow. Great offices and perks. Decent salary but hard to move from corporate to a dicision because salaries at Corp are so much higher.

Cons

One word...politics. I have never been in a company where career sucess depended so largely on the relationships and positioning of oneself. They waste a lot of time and money on the wrong things and talk about employee satisfaction but don't really care to make changes that the employees tell management they want.

Advice to Senior Management

Give your employees the opportunity to grow and work to create an environment where people are comfortable taking risks and expressing ideas. Communicate more. Dick Parsons was a great communicator and always talked to the employees. Jeff Bewkes came in made a ton of changes including cost cuts and never addressed the employee population. Rumors run wild in that place!

Pros

It's a great company to work for. The benefits are great, we got a lot of vacation days and the perks are good too. I'm very happy here, which is very important.

Cons

I don't think this company pays well as a whole

Advice to Senior Management

To praise your staff more often and acknowledge the hard and good work they do

Pros

Great perks, great benefits, liberal work environment, very good work/life balance, working at Time Warner has a "glamour industry" effect

Cons

Salary is very average/below average, talent retention is poor, communicaitons not always the strongest between departments

Advice to Senior Management

better communication regarding larger strategy that affects the rank and file, greater collaboration between divisions (HBO, Warner, Time Inc, etc)

Pros

This speaks only for the Carolinas Region: People are fantastic, benefits are amazing. This industry is very dynamic and it is nice to be with a company that wants to keep up with a quickly changing cable ad sales world. We offer our clients limitless advertising options which keeps them with us. We offer our sales team extensive training and coaching to keep up with both the industry around us and the products we offer.

Cons

Support staff is not well compensated. While we do offer so many options for clients, it can become overwhelming to our sales team to keep all the initiatives straight and top of mind.

Advice to Senior Management

Don't forget the folks in the trenches - we really need them more than anyone. Communication is key - right now it is drifting away as the market is in the toilet. And this is when we need it the most.

Pros

There seems to be good compensation, good benefits; lots of talented, hard-working colleagues and teamwork. Creative opportunities abound as company strives to expand brands and become more current and viable.

Cons

There seems to be a souring atmosphere as people fear for their jobs, as many have been cut in the last several years. Perhaps this lack of security helps to create the negative competition and unnecessary territoriality that exists among colleagues in some divisions. Some upper management lack social skills which makes employees feel ignored, unrecognized and unhappy. Hiring freezes mean jobs go unfilled; therefore, managers are overloaded, and can't run departments efficiently.

Advice to Senior Management

Talk to and engage employees. Encourage and excite rather than impose fear. Strive to become familiar with changing needs of departments and individuals. Recognize talent and invest in it longer term.

Pros

It has a fabulous reputation, and it has the highest standards--at least in the magazine business where I work. If you can make it there, you can make it anywhere.

Cons

In the magazine division, there is a definite lack of investment and interest by top management. We have seen layoff after layoff, and people are worried all the time that our department will be axed as have several others in recent years. The top management acts as though magazines are so yesterday, and maybe they are, but, there'll always be a big business there, with millions to earn. And it's hard to work in a climate where the predominant strategy is disinvestment.
Also, we never hear from top management, have no idea where we fit in, what the strategy is, or whether we will be sold to another company.
I was here before and then returned recently to work here, and it is sad to find how few resources now are being devoted to real journalism, which is what I am here to do. Everything has to be done on the cheap. It's no longer Paradise.

Advice to Senior Management

You have to spend money to make money. So spend a little. For example, you'll never get good advertisers in magazines when you downgrade the paper and make their ads look like crap.