Ameriprise Employee Reviews about "people"

Pros

Terrific culture, work/life balance. The people that work here are top notch individuals whether it's direct managers or business partners.

Cons

Pay is the only issue as it is significantly less than what is available in the market. This is especially true if you start your career with the company as annual merit increases are marginal.

Pros

Ameriprise is a good firm, and most groups treat their employees with respect and dignity (not RCS).

Cons

All Work - No Life Approach - Internal Audit (aka RCS / Risk Control Services) prides itself as an old fashion management style. You are lucky to have a job and there is no room for hurt feelings or people that don’t “want to work”. They are looking for “big 4 types”; people that “want to work” and will happily work long days and weekends (not to get ahead but to run with the pack, as everyone is required to put in long hours). If you want to work as if you are on the partner track, without any track or any example of anyone that advanced by following the program, this is the job for you. You are scheduled to work 42 hours a week, and if you need to get caught up or want to get ahead, you will do it after you have worked the scheduled 42 hours. Take a 2 week vacation and you will have to make up the 4 hours you missed when you return. The 42 hours is not usually an issue because most people are working well over 50 hours per week year-round (more during busy season). While there is paid sick time, if you are sick Wednesday, plan to work all day Saturday and Sunday to keep up on the time you missed while sick and the normal weekend time you would have to had to have worked. The audit plan is ridiculously aggressive. When assigned an audit, it is generally half the time you would reasonably assume it would take to complete. Through the planning process you can negotiate more time, but best-case scenario is generally 70% of what would be reasonable. You are left with a catch 22. You either report your hours that go over budget and “explain in detail why” or you underreport your hours and appear successful. If you have professional certifications plan on taking a lot of free CPE as the budget for paid CPE is small and spend is highly correlated to the people that charge the most hours to audits. Expect to get regular emails asking you why you charged 11 hours to do a task they believe should have taken 7. You will get these 6 weeks after you enter the time and be expected to provide details on why you took longer than the “expectation”. Three years is about the max you will see in tenure for people that are assigned audits (there are admins and special projects team members that have somewhat better success). There is no plan for career progression, no expects you will last more than a few years and you are treated like a contractor.

Pros

company was really good at recognizing hard work and people were really great to work with

Cons

tend to be a very silo organization so you don't learn more than the tasks assigned to you. Organization tends to take advantage of people and several people end up working long hours.

Pros

Good product; care about clients; smart people

Cons

Relatively toxic culture; lack innovation and investment; some people really need to move on to new jobs

Pros

I was fortunate to work on several teams where collaboration was highly valued, autonomy was encouraged, and our team members were treated like adults instead of employees. The environment was business casual, and my leaders generally had a good open-door policy.

Cons

Reorganizations were frequent (often internally referred to as Spring Cleaning and Fall Cleaning), so as changes would start there was always concern about whether 'your' job would be affected. Communications surrounding change was sometimes lacking, so there would be unanswered questions as to the thought process behind the changes. The benefits package was fair, but the company requires employees to save and use their personal PTO for days when the corporate office is closed (market holidays). PTO does not carry over, but sick days do. That being said, sick days were reduced from six to four in 2008 or 2009. The stated reason was corporate research indicated people only used an average of four sick days per year - but they did not offer any balance to the removal of the two extra days (i.e. two extra PTO days), just took them away.

Pros

Smaller offices than big banks so you get to work with people more on a face to face basis. If you're lucky enough to work with advisors that actually care, which are few and far in between, you may learn a little bit.

Cons

Management doesn't have a clue how to run a business. They change how they do things like the wind. No real leadership. They promote whoever works more than their fair share for the longest amount of time with the least amount of complaints.