Wachovia Reviews in Raleigh-Durham, NC Area

Pros

Great people, excellent customer service

Cons

low pay, work many weekends

Advice to Senior Management

Treament to employees is very good

Pros

Good Benefits, good coworkers, bottom level very good people, strong focus on customer service. Employees work together and try very hard to please upper management and get them off of their backs

Cons

Severly cut pay since Wells Fargo came in, constant micromanagement with no benefit to employee, no room to move up, insulting daily campaigns

Advice to Senior Management

Listen to employees, dont talk down to them, respect their intelligence

Pros

Ok salary compared to similar positions at other banks

Cons

Changes are communicated mostly through email, which you will get about 30 a day minimum. Very high pressure sales, continually focused on "solutions," even if it may not be the right thing for the customer. Little recognition when you do a great job, but constantly berate you when you are not hitting unrealistic goals. Micro-management!! You have reports to fill out on your reports! Can spend just as much time letting management know what you did that day as the time it took for you to complete those tasks.

Advice to Senior Management

Streamline the process of communicating changes. Set more realistic goals.

Pros

They promote from within, so if you get your foot in the door and work hard, you can climb the ladder. Getting a good branch manager or district manager can make life a lot easier. Relatively easy to cross sell

Cons

Management out of touch with employees, high pressure sales, preach to sell what is right to the customer but it's obvious that doesnt matter, just cross sell, cross sell, cross sell even to the detriment of the customer. Too much weekend work, definately not banker's hours

Advice to Senior Management

Get in touch with your employees, DONT TALK DOWN TO THEM LIKE THEY ARE 12 YR OLDS.

Pros

* great training provided.
* help you get licensed series 6, series 63, series 65 and NC Life & Health Insurance
*Multi-skilled i.e you handle investments , mortgage refinancing, consumer loans, small business loans

Cons

* A whole lot of micro-management
* since Wells fargo acquiring , the job has been diminished.it is more about pushing check cards, small savings accts, and online banking

Advice to Senior Management

less micro-management
focus on customer service
put value in employees that have taken time to further education

Pros

Wachovia maintains a great work and home balance in addition to the opportunity for some flex time and telecommuting opportunites for some teams.

Cons

The current merger uncertainty with Wells Fargo makes planning and career stability a constant worry. While some teams have been mapped to their Wells Fargo counterparts, most mapping excercises are in their infancy leaving many employees searching for other opportunies and trying to find meaningful work on a day to day basis.

Advice to Senior Management

I would suggest that the current Wells Fargo Executive team adhere to their long standing "Retain and Retrain" policy regarding legacy Wachovia employees. Currently their is an increasing "brain drain" withing the legacy Wachovia infrastructure which will impace profitability in the long term.

Pros

Overall, this is a good company to work for, but this is very dependent on your direct manager. The company has become incredibly micro-managed, and report driven, however there are still some good managers within the company who are able to shield their employees from this. If you do not have one of these managers, you can expect a large amount of time to be taken up completing reports and explaining performance. This can be a very short-sighted strategy.

Cons

Very micro-managed environment. There is more emphasis put on the date entry and analysis of reports, than on discussions with actual employees. Very limited career advancement opportunities, it is very clear that this is an organization where who you know, matters much more than what you know.

Advice to Senior Management

Ease up on the micro-management and spend more time on developing your employees. Make sure that the message being given at the top of the company, actually trickles down to the actions being displayed at the client level.

Pros

The offer a flexible work environment where you can shift hours to something that works for you, at least in some assignments.

Cons

Things are very uncertain now since the merger with Wells Fargo.

Advice to Senior Management

Communication down to the employees could be better. Then again, information doesn't flow that much with the recent merger.

Pros

It was a great job for the set hours and days. I knew what days and hours I would work every day and every week. We were off on all recognized holidays, had a PTO allotment that increased based on years served. In your first year you got 120 hours of PTO and once you reached your 4th year that increased to I think 150.

Cons

The merger situation made work life competitive. They pushed sales credits and selling products to customers too much. They were way too tied to a script in the presentation that when you walked into a financial center it sounded like robots. Everyone was saying the EXACT same thing. They would criticize you for not going word for word by their little "list"

Advice to Senior Management

I would say to take a step back and think about naturalness over equality in the branches. Leave a little freedom for personality in dealing with customers.

Pros

the benefits are pretty good. opportunity for advance is good

Cons

upper management does not have ethics in place and forces goals that are not obtainable. lack of professionalism in upper management and not using the abilities of branch managers damages the overall company. the first union merger ruined wachovia in just a few short years

Advice to Senior Management

get rid of the cut throat competition and do what is right for the customer. because of upper management, financial specialist are forced work to far in the gray area in order to meet their numbers. what happens is then the fs sells things the customer doesnt need and makes sales credits. the customer never uses it and the bank never makes a profit from it.