UnitedHealth Group Reviews in Minneapolis-St. Paul, MN Area

Pros

You can learn more here in a year than in 10 years spent elsewhere. It is very fast paced and the people at all levels are extremely bright. You will definitely develop yourself. If you don't, you will be left behind. UHG is extremely innovative for a large company and is willing to spend money to do things right if you have a business case that makes sense. Very metrics focused Company, if you are analytical you will do well.

Cons

The health benefits are appalling. Basically the cost is shifted entirely onto you. I have a dependent who has a chronic condition and we paid $1,000s out of pocket for prescriptions each year. Fortunately, the rest of my family is healthy. It seems pretty immoral. Management claims that they are providing incentives for people to lead healthier lives. The reality is they are restricting access through cost shifting.

They have a cost cutting culture that doesn't always make sense. People are laid off and then rehired.

The workload is unrelenting. It doesn't compare on any level with anywhere else I have ever worked.

Advice to Senior Management

A large dose of humanity would be good....my understanding is that it is getting better there with new social responsibility initiatives.

Pros

Depending on dept and work.
For Namesake
Implements cuting edge tools and processes

Cons

Compensation and Insurance is very poor
Internal HR recruitment policy is neither geared towards retention nor facilitate movement.
Beneficial to move out and come back in
Some dept have too much favoritism

Advice to Senior Management

Need to focus on Meritocracy, developing talents.
HR policies need to be revisited.

Pros

large group, megacorp benefits (tuition reimbursement, adoption, etc)
high turnover
workout room in head quarters
alot of parking
friendly team members

Cons

low pay, bad merit raises, don't count on bonuses, management is unaware of who actually perform the work
bandaid approach to any regulatory issues

Advice to Senior Management

be fair to your employees

Pros

UHG has a very large presence in Minnesota, specifically the western suburbs of Minneapolis. Their size allows for many *potential* openings (more on this later), and can look on a resume. While the health/dental insurance is flat out poor, the company is generous with PTO. UHG is also very progressive with telecommuting arrangements (whereas most companies are still in the dark ages with this, and see working from as too revolutionary).

Cons

As the headline states, it's not who you are it's who you know. While it's true that this can be said of many companies and organizations, it is especially true at UHG. Being friends with the hiring manager will fast track you to a new position far quicker than actually being the most qualified applicant. In other words, people with mediocre experience and skills (but may have had a few happy hours with the hiring managers) are promoted, NOT the most qualified applicant. This is very frustrating.

Even in the darkest economy, this company has thousands of job openings in the TC metro area alone. This speaks volumes about the company's ability to retain talent. External candidates are almost always perceived as being more hopeful and "exotic" than internal candidates, who are typically seen as "plain". As long as the hiring department can afford it, external candidates are paid whatever they ask for regardless of their current salary. But once you're in the door, you have no leverage with negotiating future salaries, and your new salary is based entirely on your current salary regardless of what others are making in the same position. The company would rather have people leave to make a competitive salary somewhere else than just pay their employees what they'll end up paying an external candidate anyway (i.e. someone with little/no direct knowledge of the position, may or may not work out, may or may not bail after a month due to a better offer, etc.).

Long story short, make very sure that the salary you settle on is truly what you're after because it will not go up even after years in the same position. And if you get promoted to a higher level position, the increase will be noticeably less than what you would receive from a different company. Unless you regularly go out with your boss and buy them drinks, or flat out kiss their @$$.

Advice to Senior Management

There really needs to be much closer oversight on the hiring process. Managers are given way too much personal leeway with who they're hiring and promoting, and it's almost always based on who they're buds with. The most qualified applicants are NOT being offered positions.

As to salaries, you can't spend all year inundating employees' inboxes with how well the company is doing, but then lean on "it's not the budget" when annual raises come around. Especially when the top executive's multi-million dollar salaries are public knowledge. Also, our health insurance costs are downright embarrassing for one of the largest, wealthiest health insurers in the country.

Keep being progressive about telecommuting. Few companies are as progressive about this as UHG. PTO is also generous.

Pros

UnitedHealth Group has great benefit package, beginning wages are fair, offer broadbanding pay scales, flexible scheduling and they have improved their work-life balances.

Cons

Despite frustrations and advice from management, senior management determines production levels that are constantly increasing and do not embrace the entire workload. Nonproductive work has to be be completed and for each hour spent on nonproductive work, employees are expected to makeup these hours with what manages considers productive work. For example, when claims adjusting department was in a severe backlog, our team was pulled to help. Each hour we were helping had to be made up by the end of the week. This type of work arrangement happened frequently. Also, there is no such thing as time off. When on vacation or leave, expect numerous hours to work numerous hours (at least they pay you for these hours!) During five years of employment, senior management implemented several unsuccessful structure changes and transferred out of the company to another within UHG. This happened four times within the five years.

Advice to Senior Management

There is a strong disconnect between senior management and lower management. Senior management has open door policies requesting feedback and information but does very little with the information. Senior management needs to remember that a success of a company occurs not just at the top and successful communication is a two-way street.

Pros

The 401K matching program is very good.

Cons

- No work/life balance - management schedules employees at 150% workload.
- Middle management avoids decision making in fear of making a mistake.
- No raises for 4 years even with record profits.

Pros

Very Flexible with worklife balance

Cons

They are in the dark ages when it comes to technology. And will not pay for top talent.. Do not expect to work with the best people or to learn very much while working here. They will not pay to keep talented empoyees around,

Advice to Senior Management

Target your investments in IT better. Work to keep talented people rather than just replacing them with warm bodies.

Pros

UHG is a large insurer that has a relatively good IT group. However, the push towards newer technologies is not that apparent.

Cons

The technologies used are quite old and the management is not very keen on using newer technologies. So, this place might be a good place for someone who wants to work on older technologies.

Advice to Senior Management

Please use newer technologies and hire people who have both a healthcare and business acumen since that will vital to UHG's future.

Pros

Salary on par with other companies. Work/Life balance is great in most departments, at least in IT. They have a open view of telecommuting and tend to adopt different forms of technology fairly early. Great bonuses, if you happen to get one.

Cons

The worst medical benefits I have ever seen, as a healthcare/insurance company I was floored when I saw what they offered and how much they charged employees. Of course they higher you are in the company the better medical benefits you had access too.

Advice to Senior Management

Take classes on leadership, most of you lack it as a skill set.

Pros

- This is a enterprise helpdesk on steroids. The helpdesk supports 74000+ end users with 4500 different software applications. UHG through all sorts of mergers and acquisitions likely has every platform known to man - Unisys and IBM mainframes, every flavor of Unix, Windows servers, Cisco VoIP phones, Cisco VPN, etc. Last I heard the company processes 1 billion claims/year. This company probably has more data bandwidth collectively than many nations do. This is a heavy-duty factory of computing that cranks out a lot of product!
- You handle something new and different everyday. Every day you learn something new or handle something new. It seems kind of daunting but is rather fun. This is a large company with every kind of discipline possible: claims processing, network management, underwriting, sales, IT, legal, advertising/marketing, finance, accounting, statistical analysis, doctors/nurses/counselors, etc. You will talk to people ranging from entry-level claims processors to Senior VPs in a given day. I learned a lot about all the stuff that goes on behind the scenes which makes a large health insurance company function. You can't learn every application there. But if you ask the right way most end users will happily explain how an application or process works. Some are simply glad that someone in the IT department wants to know more about what they do for a living.
- Company is not going anywhere. This is a large, solid, dependable business. People will always need what they provide. Sure they have hiccups here and there depending on new healthcare legislation but this is a company with a lot of diverse businesses. And the helpdesk was insourced from a contractor a few years ago which many levels of IT management seem to be thrilled with.
- The IT department generally seems well put together. Processes are well-designed, documented and executed. There seems to be a web form, tool or application for EVERYTHING. Very little done on paper or without automation.
- 23 days of annual PTO to use. Days off granted on a first come, first served basis.
- 99% of calls are from internal customers. You are very rarely dealing with the general public so you don't have to deal with people screaming in your face. Supervisors will generally defend you if there is a problem with a customer.

Cons

- This office is the epitome of "Office Space". Everything is sterile, boring, soulless and in the middle of austere suburban surroundings. It is full of the same meaningless corporate cliches as you see in the movie. It doesn't feel like an IT department. You feel like you work in a customer service call center. You might as well sell magazine subscriptions. The people are boring and lifeless. Everyone and everything is so overly PC it is inhumane. There is very little social interaction. You are very unlikely to ever see your coworkers outside of work. If you do all they talk about is their little universe of resetting passwords for a living. All of the restaurants around this locale will fatten you up quick.
- If you have any kind of personality this place will stifle you quickly and/or they show you the door in no time. They want "yes men" and quiet robots. Granted most of the corporate world is like that but this place brings that concept to the extreme.
- There is little pride here. Someone else on Glassdoor said about UHG, "There is no pride here. Everyone wishes they worked somewhere else. They are all here only to put this on their resume." How true.
- If you like to use your natural creativity and tech-mindedness to solve interesting problems this place will burn you out fast. You very rarely get to delve deep into problems, your job mostly consists of writing tickets and sending the issues to workgroups. The company wants first-call resolutions but fails to let you do the work you need to do so. The company wants 8 minute resolutions to things that can't be done in 8 minutes. To some people - customers and management alike - all you are is a professional ticket-writer and are treated like such.
- The lower and middle-level management are not very competent. Most of them have never done this kind of work and are not very qualified to tell you how to do your job. They often have very poor social skills, issues with communication and horrendous writing skills. They don't handle any kind of escalations and you can't go to them for help in the middle of a call. All they really appear to do is tell you what you did wrong and gab amongst themselves while you have 40 calls in queue. They do their utmost to rub it in your face that they are a notch above you. I've rarely received any help from management types at this place. I am not saying this because I have some general dislike for management, in fact, I truly seek out managers whom I can respect and learn from. I didn't have one at this job. They are all a bunch of dead weight.
- Supervisors try to mask their own incompetence through rampant micromanagement. If they can make some case that their employees are all incompetent and need to be continually managed then it makes them look superior and/or justifies their job.
- Everything is about ridiculous sets of metrics. Everything. Again this goes back to the customer service vs. helpdesk issue. They care more about how long you were in a call than if you were able to do something to get this person up and working. Show up from lunch a minute late and they will complain about it. Go over 8 mins. in some call and a crazy supervisor will have a fit. They care more about call handling stats than people fixing problems. I always thought helpdesks fixed things.
- EVERYTHING you do is recorded, both your phone audio and your screen video while in a call. It is so 1984 it is ridiculous. Call audio is one thing but the video is just to stalkerish for me. Never do anything that doesn't involve your job. I've never seen such a level of micromanagement.
- Nobody talks to each other in person or on the phone in the office. It is all done through an instant messaging tool. Sometimes I need to talk to someone face to face. Don't get caught using the IM tool while in a call or you will hear about it.
- You are chained to your desk the entire day. All you do is answer phone calls. You will forget what it was like to actually repair a computer. You will forget what it was like to walk. There is no face-to-face interaction. You will put on some pounds.
- Your social interaction is all with people far away. West Coast, East Coast, Texas, down South, even India and the Phillipines. Let's just say you will meet a lot of nice folks but never ever get to have a drink with them.
- The coffee in this place is the worst coffee that has ever existed. I don't see how it can be legally sold for human consumption. I understand it's free but the nearest real coffee stand is way too far to make it to on a break.
- They will paint some bright portrait of career advancement. Get in the door and you will find out it was all a pipe dream. You may get out of there but only if you make absolutely ZERO waves and only if you treat your master exactly how they want to be treated.
- UHG's health benefits, for being a HEALTH INSURANCE company, are pretty lousy. You could work at STARBUCKS slinging coffee and have better health insurance.
- If you like learning what is happening in other parts of the company look in the newspaper. Granted the place is huge but I saw more current news about UHG in the newspaper business section than in my own internal communications.
- Your CEO makes more in an hour than you will make in an entire year at this job.
- Raises and bonuses are a joke. If you were "lucky" to receive a raise it was less than inflation. Bonuses? I made more in bonuses at manual labor jobs that I had in school than I did at this so-called "professional" job.

Advice to Senior Management

Treat your employees like grownups - don't micromanage - and they will act like grownups all by themselves! For being a health insurance company, give us health insurance that is actually something to brag about. I hear lots about keeping call quality up while keeping per call cost down. Maybe if you, oh, let your skilled helpdesk personnel try to fix problems and not have them just farm EVERYTHING to workgroups they may help you in achieving this goal! Make UHG a brand for everyone to be proud of and that pride will rub off in the work that everyone does; proud people do work that they can boast about. Make a REAL path for people to move up with, a management path if you will. Why stick around and why work hard if there is no kind of reward for me in sight?