WellPoint Reviews

Pros

Fabulous benefits, positive culture, good at promoting from within, decent bonuses

Cons

annual reorganization and frequent layoffs are really the bane of working for this company. It seems counter-productive to put people on severance only to rehire them a few months later instead it would be better to offer and require your people to continually improve their knowledge so that they can be ready to change as the industry changes and grows.

Advice to Senior Management

Stop with the re-organization instead of laying people off train people to meet the changing needs of the industry.

Pros

Ability to work from home whenever I wanted. Fitness center on site. Annual bonus program is fair and very nice in good years. Layoffs seemingly occur enterprise wide on an annual basis, but the severance package is generous and the company is good about re-hiring former associates.

Cons

The instability surrounding healthcare reform and frequent layoffs. The company had a major reduction in force every year for the five years I was there.

Advice to Senior Management

More transparency about the reason for frequent re-organizations and the resulting layoffs would be welcome. Especially when they occur in what was a very successful year financially.

Pros

Decent pay, GREAT benefits. Great co-workers. Biggest private health insurance company in the country. Tuition reimbursement is awesome. When you work for this company, you feel like part of a movement. Fortune 100 company.

Cons

When company lays off, they lay off big. High outsourcing priority, sure it's good for companies pockets, but not very good for customer outlook and therefore, customer service suffers. We need to keep jobs in America, unemployment is a gushing wound. Many organizational changes, you could wake up on any day of the week and have a different boss, or be unemployed. Even though company doing well financially, they still eliminate jobs and end up short changing employees. I feel as if they should reward employees more financially for the large financial success that we all contribute to. In comparison to other companies, salary is just average.

Advice to Senior Management

Stop outsourcing and laying off employees that have devoted YEARS and YEARS to this company. Stop eliminating jobs and create ways to keep stellar performers, and create more opportunities for us. The price you save in outsourcing, you lose in devotion, experience, and service.

Pros

Great people. Calls can be tough at times but lots of support

Cons

Takes time to learn but not enough time given to understand calls. Got to experience on your own

Advice to Senior Management

Take your time learning during training.

Pros

Well established company, great benefits, good pay.

Cons

Lack of communication, lack of recognition and I feel it is difficult to advance within the company.

Advice to Senior Management

Communication Communication Communication!

Pros

Telecommuting is a standard for them and it's nice to not to have to commute to work daily!

Cons

They have entirely too many initiatives going on at one time and too much overhead administrative requirements to get your job done, too many Chiefs and no Indians!

Advice to Senior Management

Understand how to properly staff your organization and eliminate all the executive overhead which stop the workers from working because they require 1000 reports that they don't read

Pros

- Strong benefits, one of the few healthcare companies that still offers an HMO option.
- Account Management team gets along well supports one another.
- Name recognition of Blue Cross Blue Shield in GA. is a strong suit.

Cons

- Lack of customer focus.
- Books of business are way to large to pro-actively manage customers or brokers needs.
- Very unreasonable work loads.
- Poor leadership leading to very poor employee morale.
- Antiquated technology and poor quality control lends itself to much rework in the organization & customer/broker abrasion.

Advice to Senior Management

Bring technology into the 21st Century in GA. It's killing the local health plans reputation and is impacting operting efficiencies & resulting in declining local market share.

Pros

Lots of advancement opportunity if your relationships with your peers, superiors and their peers is good. Diversity is heavily advocated and visible. Tremendous growth potential in industry.

Cons

Some of the most amazing and resourceful people work for this company but they keep getting laid off even though the company is doing well financially. Seems to be done to hit quarterly numbers so executives will get their bonuses. Those numbers should be achieved by doing the real, hard work of improving the infrastructure in a constructive and thoughtful manner and maybe occassionally choosing some short-term pain for some long term gain because it's the right thing to do.

Advice to Senior Management

The primary advice would be to invest and support some big consolidation efforts for both technology and practices and allow them to be thoroughly implemented. They have 27 ways to do the same thing on every system and in every group. These strategic technology projects typically get their funding cut in the middle of year so that executive bonuses won't be adversely affected and the Wall Street numbers will be good. Those must be their objectives because they never fail to hit them but they may not be hitting them in the most constructive way. Projects to change major practices usually don't receive enough funding to get everyone trained or at least exposed to the new ideas so everyone speaks the same language. They piecemeal everything to save money but it's not effective. Pick a few things each year then commit and complete them would be the consise version. Second, I'd recommend a different management practice and philosphy. All managers spend the majority of their time managing up rather than guiding and supporting the people that work for them which is part of my definition of management. Third, stop relying so much on outside consulting. Those companies have a goal of extending the work they do for their clients not bringing those relationships to a successful close. You have the talent within your own walls to do the same work for less. Create a consuting bureau and allow senior employees to serve in a consulting capacity for 3 months or 6 months from their core jobs. Their base teams would have a chance to do some cross training and they employee would learn something new and the company would get the same advise for a much lower cost than from the big consulting firms. I suggested this while I was there but it went no where.

Pros

There all kinds of opportunities at Wellpoint to find an area that matches your skills because of the variety of functions and departments.

Cons

Over the last years there have been so much restructuring and changing priorities that the employees seem to be the ones wondering about their job security a lot. Departments outsource or eliminate positions often.

Advice to Senior Management

People make up a company, not just projects, budgets and management priorities. Improve what exists and consider loyalty to employees more.

Pros

Flexibility in scheduling. Good health promotion benefits such as wt loss programs and gym reimbursements.

Cons

Very expensive health insurance for an employee working FOR the insurance company.

Advice to Senior Management

Be upfront and timely with business announcements.