American Family Insurance Employee Reviews about "work from home"

Pros

Excellent benefits for medical, dental and optical as well as flex spending accounts for child care and medical. If you can get one of the very few amazing managers within the company then you are golden.

Cons

Management is very vocal and being employee focused with significant marketing about employee programs when in reality the individual unique needs of the employees are not addressed or recognized. Long term employees are encouraged via negative feedback to leave the company with new employees who have significantly lower salaries are brought in. Turnover is high due to purposeful understaffing with a management expectation that the employee will place the priority on the company over the family. Flexible scheduling and work from home options are hyped and not a reality.

Pros

It is a stable company. The directors and staff persons are always attempting to find better ways to do things.

Cons

I work for my husband who is the agent. Since we are together basically everyday at work we sometimes struggle in separating our home life from our office life.

Pros

Being at NHQ, medical benefits were good. Pension, 401K (with match) were great. PTO and a somewhat flexible schedule, with full time work from home during the pandemic were a huge plus. Direct manager and director were amazing and great people to work for.

Cons

TLDR: No service desk support in a timely manner, extremely toxic workplace, gaslighting employees, customer and employee welfare has been thrown to the side in favor of profits and unmaintainable metrics. Where do I even begin. My division was stuck in a reorg for six additional months before any information was available to us. Due to being 'over budget' 70+ people from the division were told they were losing their jobs, two people from my department (myself and one other person). We were offered a decent severance package if we were not able to find a job in a different area of the company. As someone that didn't go to college, I did not have the skills they were seeking for the jobs listed at that time, so I had to accept the severance package. My last 30 days of work were a train wreck. Trying to work with HR about questions I had about the package was horrible. They kept referring me to the rep assigned to our division, but he never had the answers and said I should ask someone in HR, or he would ask and get back to me. He never did. Most of the people that were part of the lay-off were of retirement age and could 'retire out' and retain benefits longer than the rest of us that were not able to do that. We had generalized Teams and Zoom meetings where the designated HR rep and one other person were there to answer questions that people had. The meetings were mostly people asking about their retirement benefits, so being present for them was a waste of time. My department did not make people reapply for their jobs and that was entirely unfair to the other person that was let go along with myself. However, after some time away from the company it's been realized this other co-worker and I were the only two that spoke up when there was unfair and preferential treatment towards employees. Being the “squeaky wheel” if you will. We both also had connectivity issues with the VPN for the corporate server when we went work from home. I had a service desk ticket that was open for months because no one was able to help. Because of the connectivity issues, my production went down, and it hurt my personal metrics. Everything was out of my hands; outdated technology, lack of knowledgeable in-house service desk reps, and construction work in my area where they hit a fiber optics cable that knocked out the internet for the entire neighborhood. I was not able to go into the office because of pandemic guidelines at the time. I was finally issued a new laptop and that helped the connectivity issues, but they were still present the entire time I was WFH as the VPN kept dropping me. In the final few days of my employment with AmFam, I was never offered an exit interview. I don’t know if exit interviews are a corporate standard, but as far as I know until that round of layoffs, they were standard at AmFam. By not having them, I feel that makes them look bad and like they are hiding something. During the pilot for Return To Office, three people from my department were made to go in for 3 days. While we were there in the open floor plan area, people complained that we were too noisy, and our phones constantly ringing were too much for them. A plethora of sticky notes were posted to the pros and cons boards near the elevators on the floor we were forced to work on were all negative comments about my department being there. The entire floor was divided into three sections; the first section you could be loud but had no docking stations for work laptops. The second section had docking stations and desks set up in pods of 4 where you could work with co-workers and maintain a quieter work environment but still can converse like you were working on a group project. The last section was to be completely silent, no loud talking, no phone conversations, treat it like you were at a library. Because we needed docking stations to be able to do our job, we were forced to sit in the second section where talking was permitted. None of us wanted to be in the silent section and we sat as far away from that area that we could. We were not loud, ringers were so low we missed calls, and the people around us were having conversations louder than we were with customers on the phone. Our feedback from participating in the pilot was looked at and thrown to the side. We never should’ve been part of the pilot to begin with, but the VP wanted every department in her division to participate because she was at the office too and wanted to see for herself how it would work out. Hard to do that when you lock yourself away in an office with a door to shut out the noise of employees doing their jobs in the open floor plan. The people in these senior leadership roles have let their employees down. The backtrack and gaslight when it comes to corporate policies and the precious work life balance, they were all about before the pandemic. Now that they are lonely in the gilded offices, they want their lowly underpaid employees to return to the office and be miserable from sunup to sundown. The current CEO, Bill Westrate, is a coward that hides from employees in his office all day. Which is ironic since he was the driving force behind the RTO mandate because he was lonely at the NHQ campus and wanted to see employees filling the cubicles and hallways again; clearly with no regard to the lives they built in the 2 years of being forced to WFH. Westrate has turned a once thriving company that cared about customers and employees into shambles with burnt out employees and unsatisfied customers in 10 months since he took over as CEO on January 1, 2022. With all of that said, more cons would be that there is still the “Good Ol Boys” feel and tons of nepotism. Since I started there in late 2008, it was never about what you know and your good customer service traits. It has always been and still is about who you know. People were hired in my department that had no business being there, but they were childhood friends of another manager or the to be niece-in-law of the manager at that time. My department has been through three different managers since I started in it. As a whole the environment is extremely toxic and it’s getting worse. With the constant re-organizing of departments and letting people go because it’s the Lean thing to do, they are forcing those left to work double and triple their expected work amount with no extra pay and to be done in the same 40 hours as everyone else. They also black list good employees so they aren’t moving to other departments because they are too good at what they currently do and constantly pick up the slack from worthless employees that should be let go. Various departments are a complete mess because of constantly changing workflow, job descriptions, and work procedures. Some departments have had long standing contracts with partner companies cancelled for no reason and without advance notice, causing so much extra work to clean up the mess caused by the senior leadership team.

Pros

Flexible work schedule and work from home options

Cons

No Health Insurance or paid time off

Pros

Work from home and flexibility

Cons

Workload is overwhelming and work life balance

Pros

Hours. Work from home and pay are all wonder benefits

Cons

Some days I feel like I’m winging it with lack of training

Pros

I truly enjoy the work I'm doing and the opportunities I have to grow my skills. My manager and the manager above them are both great people to work with. No complaints at all about them. They are very supportive. During the pandemic, the company bent over backwards to support employees in remote work. I have never been happier and more productive than in a work from home arrangement. My team is scattered around the country and we all work extremely well together. The remote work is extremely valued by all. All employees were given the option to declare their work preference: Full time in office, hybrid, or full time remote. For those that chose full time remote, which was >85%, we were told that if we were happy working remote and were productive, there would never be a need to return to working in an office.

Cons

Two weeks ago the company completely reversed direction on remote work that had been in place for 2-1/2 years with no consideration for how it impacted the workforce. Even prior to the pandemic, there were hundreds of employees in my division that were hired as remote workers. With the new policy, everyone is required to return to the office at least 50% of the time if they live within a 50 mile radius of an office. This includes people that were hired as remote workers and have never spent a single day in the office since they were hired up to 10 years ago. With this sudden reversal in direction, we are all just waiting for the next announcement that it will be 100% in-office work. The only explanation is that it's "for a better collaborative experience". I'm not alone in the fact that my team is scattered across locations. Even when I return to an office near me, none of my coworkers will be there. I will be forced to commute 90 minutes each day to sit in an office on Zoom calls talking to people in other parts of the country. I will collaborate with no one in person. We will not have assigned desks. It's a "hotel cube" meaning we will have to carry all our belongings back and forth to work each day and leave nothing on the desk because you'll be sitting at a different desk the next time you come in. Many employees bought bigger houses farther away from their local office to have the space for a home office in their house. Others sold second vehicles that were no longer needed to commute. The fury of employees over this decision is well known via postings on internal communications sites. Yet executive management ignores the sentiment of the workforce and just presses on with unjustified mandates. The decision made by executive management to force this change wasn't even communicated by them. They forced human resources to make the announcement and then hid behind them while HR took the full force of employee outrage. Not a word of this policy change was ever communicated by the CEO. I foresee a significant number of good employees leaving the company over this decision to step backwards to an outdated employment model despite their claims of being a progressive and innovative company intent on being a leader in the industry. They will lose these good employees to other companies that realize they need to actually be progressive and hire talented people and allow them to work the way they are most productive and happy. Unhappy employees do not stay around long.

Pros

Benefits package including pension, 401K, bonus and nice company cars. Work from home and set your own appointment schedule. No out of pocket expenses.

Cons

Long hours and heavy workload. Field adjusters leaving and not replaced. Long drive times (at least 150 miles per day) to cover unstaffed territory. Be ready to get tapped for 3-4 week catastrophe duty (or workload assist anywhere in the operating territory) at a moments notice. Talk "world class" service - for the customer that apparently means go get your desk adjuster (100's or 1000's of miles away) an estimate and photos and wait a week for a check. Or, find out your estimate is too high (or that doesn't look like a 4.0 hr dent) and claim reassigned to the field.

Pros

Lots of flexibility and opportunities to work from home which has resulted in additional opportunities opening within the enterprise. New and innovative work in product and services

Cons

Change of pace is almost too quick resulting in breakdown of communication at times and overlap of work. Opportunities to move into new roles could be limited depending on area.

Pros

I thrived on the challenges of working for a high-level sales director.

Cons

Travel time was quite a bit - but I am able now to be away from home up to 50% of the work week.