Wachovia Reviews

Pros

As a loan counselor, you worked as pre-foreclosure and it felt rewarding to help people regain a foothold on paying their mortgage.

Cons

As a loan counselor, you quickly realized MANY loans were released and originated for people who could NOT afford their loan. In many situations unfortunately, there was an inability to retain a borrower in their home and their options were best to sell the home. However, during the beginning of the recession, I worked during the peak time when it seemed everyone in our nation was losing their home. Loans were sold to people who may have not understood what an ARM loan is, many people explained that they did not understand what they had entered. This argument can go both ways, I wish to remain neutral.

Advice to Senior Management

Leadership and advancement is recognized by individuals who show such skills and work diligently. Good work ethic, effort is recognized. Your contribution is definitely recognized and WITH TIME you will move upward.

Pros

Lots of jobs to choose

Cons

managers have limited authority. They have a very canned approach to managing and leading. Too concerned about what the press and wall street thinks so they make decisions for the wrong reasons. Layoffs are the norm here. Sometimes employees have to repost for their own jobs. Employees generally don't trust the company and so they are not loyal.

Advice to Senior Management

Spend a day in the life of your organization doing the job at the lowest level, serving the customer and anything else necessary. You'll learn a lot.

Pros

-Opportunity to grow if you are sales oriented and make a good impression to upper management.
-Decent salary (negociate if you have experience)

Cons

-The company culture is too sales oriented. Upper management and even branch management does not care if its a slow day or if you don't work much.. they expect core sales goals ot "solutions" to be met daily.
-We did not receive a pay raise the past year
-Wells Fargo's benefits package is horrible
-Bonuses seem non-existent, they dont compare to previous Wachovia structure.

Advice to Senior Management

Listen to your employee's, no one is happy. Have a training program in place to help with sales. You can't expect people to sale without training.

Pros

Great growth potential from within

Cons

salary is not as competitive

Advice to Senior Management

Wachovia is a great company

Pros

Overall, good people around who work hard and want to do their best. Not sure how the merger with Wells is going though.

Cons

Senior leadership was clueless as to the risk that was being taken by some trading desks. I felt they had no clue what was going on.

Advice to Senior Management

Do full due diligence when buying companies. See Goldenwest merger. That was a comlete disaster for all involved and could have been avoided.

Pros

Being Part of Wachovia was the greatest experience ever. Great talented people and place to work with lots of recognization. Service was something that Wachovia stand for, not Wells Fargo.

Cons

Wells Fargo took over Wachovia and with the merge going on, nobody cares about nobody even the clients. Sales Sales Sales and Sales no talking about anything else other than selling solutions that really means is more like a problem for the clients. No recognization around Wachovia employees, they are bringing upper manager from Wells Fargo that don't know anything about the market and they don't have any clue around management people because they are not people people.

Advice to Senior Management

Trust and Leverage the people with have from Wachovia. We were in training for over 3-4 month to b the Best of the Best in the Banking industry.

Pros

great management no financial rewards.....good people they all as helpful as they coyuld under the given circumstances....it was alot of interest

Cons

no financial rewards kept in the dark about almost everything in the world of mergers and new hires. was very very frustrating

Advice to Senior Management

none

Pros

Stable place to work. Great benefits. Friendly co-workers. Room for advancement.

Cons

Micro Managing. Inexperienced managers, training is not adequate in most cases without industry experience to back up your position. Product pushing is a bit much, but all companies do this now. Banks used to be focused on customer service now it is how many products and services you can tag onto the customer before they get out the door.

Advice to Senior Management

You should really have a specialist in work-place psychology evaluate the product pushing and appointment setting goals for your branch staff, it's counter productive to your employee and customer retention and happiness.

Pros

health benefits, and savings plan

Cons

no raise very pushy about sales

Advice to Senior Management

listen to employees and just be fair

Pros

Overall, I liked a lot of the people I worked with at Wachovia, regardless of which department I was in. I found it easy to get along with the folks I worked with, generally.

Cons

Very siloed, very "clubby" too. I found myself competing with friends of a hiring manager or friends of team members on several occasions, and that generally made me feel like the deck was stacked against me. And I was the internal person.

Advice to Senior Management

Always seek out the best idea. Never bias yourself to just seeking out ideas from certain people or certain groups. That never works.