Thomson Reuters Reviews

Pros

Socially Responsible, Very understanding of unexpected life events. Smart people

Cons

Cost Focused, Layoffs in high cost areas are not uncommon.

Pros

Lots of opportunity because change is constant. Work with many top tier third party vendors. Tons of great people to work with at all levels.

Cons

Decisions and direction from senior leaders often done in a vacuum. Alot of work being farmed to 3rd parties, even when our experience generally hasn't been great.

Advice to Management

Stop listening to the vendors and consider more closely if the mix of 3rd party, contracted and internally provided services is benefiting the mission.

Pros

Solid, global company with good people

Cons

Trying to survive rounds of layoffs

Pros

— All said and done, this is not a bad place to try to start a career. Especially if you're a college grad that doesn't have any better options. The barrier of entry is low. They prefer a college education but anyone who has relevant experience has a shot depending on how desperate they are. — A standard PTO/Sick time system. So better than most in the US. They have an amazing community service program that... gives employees the opportunity to take time off to volunteer and get your non-profit a grant. — Shout out to my fellow people who work in the support department. I have never worked with such a large group of fun, sarcastic pessimists in my entire career. I enjoyed coming to work because I generally liked everyone I worked with. — A spacious building with room to breathe and walk. Its modern veneer hides a lack of substance that is matched only by the plot of Game of Thrones Season 8. Some find contentment in the lie. — For your first year, the work is very easy. It seems hard at first, but it gets progressively easier. It will get harder after you start learning more product lines but then eventually plateau. And once you know it, you know it. I often heard the seniors telling new reps, “You are not expected to know everything.” Once you embrace that, the job becomes less stressful. — A safe, diverse environment. There is a menagerie of different types of people on this floor. You will find your tribe. — The possibility to advance within the company. And once you get out of your initial role, it’s easier to keep moving. There has been 30 or more job opportunities available consistently in the Ann Arbor location since I started. — Best training/onboarding I’ve ever experienced in the workplace. Before you even start, you get put into a month long training with a cohort of people. The camaraderie I built with this group lasted the entire time I was at this company. The training itself gives you enough context in a product to find answers you don’t know. I felt like I barely knew the product when I first started on the phones. This is normal. Don’t expect to feel secure at first, but there are processes in place to help new reps. — Have an issue with something we do at the company? The people in charge love feedback and I have seen good suggestions get implemented quickly. You are empowered to make change and contribute. Most team leaders are also knowledgeable and can guide your career in the right direction. The support leadership is aware of the issues the department faces and I think they really do care and try to make things better. It's easy for us peasants to criticize, but navigating that Kafkaesque bureaucracy is a full-time job on its own. They are far more limited than you would think and some of the suggestions I heard from fellow reps would literally implode the department.

Cons

— There is one God. And it’s name is Phone Queue, which for brevity we will now call Q. Your whole life will be structured around Q. Notice I say life, and not day. Q determines when you can leave work. Q determines when you can take PTO. Q determines if you get to work on the other projects/assignments you have. Q even has power over when you eat, which is ironic, as it is ever hungry. Q does not care if you vomit... on your coworker's desk or you have to take your spouse to the hospital. Q only cares about its daily pound of human flesh. Q can be merciful, but only if sated by the blood and tears of your fellow employees. — I’ve been told there was a legendary time when program updates didn’t break the software you are supporting. The documentation from that time is still recorded on the stone walls within the smoker’s gazebo, chiseled in Ancient Sumerian. I think we were allowed to wear shorts back then, too. — Some managers are better than others. This is common in all companies, but it does seem that some employees end up getting fired who would have made it on other teams. I’ve heard of insane micromanaging where every blip of inactivity is questioned and others have “allegedly” been cussed out, but I never experienced that personally. — This job is often touted as a “foot in the door” for the rest of the company. This is solely dependent on our Dear Leader, Q. I saw multiple reps with applicable skills who got offered internships/opportunities in other departments get denied because Q couldn’t afford to let them go. In one of those scenarios, the rep knew only one product at the time so they would have only impacted one part of Q out of 20+ parts. This implies to me that these dangled opportunities will rarely happen. The foot in the door metaphor would be more accurate if they added “if pigs fly”, or even better, change the phrasing to “a foot in your rear to help you out the door”. In the company's defense, I understand the business reasoning behind not letting reps work in other departments, but the majority of those reps I mentioned earlier left and got jobs in their field at different companies after 2+ years of training at the company's expense. Such a waste. — There is a high ceiling for advancement in this department. It is not impossible and once you’ve broken your chains, it gets easier to keep doing so. But just realize you will be competing against 50+ internal people per job posting. It’s not uncommon for someone completely unexpected (ie. they’re rather new) to get chosen for a role, but this would be a negative for the people who don’t get the job and have based their entire career on getting to that position. This is balanced by situations where they already have someone in mind for the role, but tell all the other applicants that they stand a good chance so they can get enough applicants to have the illusion that this was an unbiased process. This leads to a two week to two month process of interviewing where they’ll still go with the person everyone knew was going to get the job in the first place. These very common scenarios create a lot of uncertainty and resentment about promotions in the department which is channeled towards the company. The salt in the support department is real, and no amount of free food or lego stations can wash it away. To be fair, the interview process has always been inherently broken. You can’t tell if an applicant is going to be good at a role after looking at a piece of paper inflating their accomplishments, having a 45 min conversation where you ask about hypothetical scenarios that may or may not be relevant to the role, and where you get answers that may not even be true and can’t be verified. It’s absurd, and it’s best to revel in that absurdity. Otherwise you’ll lose your mind and start throwing coins into the urinals and wiping your snot on the bathroom walls. (The chaotic interview structure is probably common in other companies as well, but I don’t know if Thomson Reuters should be proud to be a part of that swamp.) — You need to make a plan for what you want from the company as soon as possible. Not all product knowledge is valuable and applicable to other jobs. After mastering the customer service soft skills there is not much left to learn except for additional products. The issue is that these additional products will not necessarily help you advance to other parts of the company. It may help with some product specific roles and it will help you advance in the Support department, but if your interests lie elsewhere then it’s not worth it. Learning as many products as possible seems like a good way to get ahead. This is a trap. You will have a less flexible schedule with more stress for the same pay as everyone else. There is not one job that requires that many product knowledge bases (possibly Training/Consulting but even then I doubt you would be supporting everything). Those with IT aspirations should learn GFR, Web, and all the Systems. Those with an eye on a Development role should look at what products will have the most demand, generally a tax product or products in development. Professional Services tends to find more value with people who know GFR. Getting into the Operations or Content team requires some experience doing their work/job duties, which is only offered to those with passable metrics and product knowledge, and manager approval. Sales will look at anyone with some experience with sales. The reason this section is in the Cons, is that your manager or Operations can throw you into a training at-will, which can derail your career plan or give you irrelevant work which gives you less time to do things that will actually have an impact on your future. I see perfectly good reps with solid metrics start to flounder when they get overburdened or disillusioned. These reps usually leave in any way possible (ie. MyPay). — A silver bullet mentality. Everything looks like a nail when you just got a hammer. This is especially apparent with the company’s attempt to turn every team into one based around Agile. Agile makes more sense in an Agile role where there is a finished Agile product rather than in a call-center environment. If I had heard the word Agile one more time, I was going to Agile myself out the second floor window. But the big man in the big chair championing the system said that this will allow the company to save more money and stop the hemorrhaging of the department, so obviously they are an informed, innovative thinker. You could also try sending him your credit card information and social security number and he’ll send you back a routing number for a Nigerian bank. Expect to hear industry buzzwords all the time with people nodding their head in excitement. But don’t look into anyone’s eyes when they do it. They’ll be black and lifeless, like a doll’s eyes. You know how you can tell when you’re in their meeting, Chief? When you hear them say blockchain unironically.

Advice to Management

— I don’t believe the company should be going for the quality of employees that they’ve been looking for. Hiring people out of college or people with options is currently a bad business strategy for this department and role. Anyone who has the skills or resources to leave, or the motivation to get them, see the writing on the wall within the first six months. They give themselves a time limit for advancement and... then move on if that limit is surpassed. Why is that your problem? You waste $4-5k training someone who has no intention of staying. Their replacement gets paid a months salary before doing any real work to learn a fraction of what that rep knew and whom may also not have any intention of staying. — Work life balance is key to your retention. As soon as a rep feels like they’ve been assigned too many products, they leave making it worse for everyone else who then also consider leaving. And the word on the street is that our beloved big brothers in Operations are doublethinking the data in the opposite direction from which things will get better. But don’t worry, we still love them! — Teach reps more applicable skills. Yes, that might make retention worse, but someone may stay longer if they feel they are learning something valuable from it. The Aspiring Supervisor program is a step in the right direction. Maybe extend that format to other departments or teach more useful IT skills. — The company has a staff utilization issue. Overly cross-training reps spreads the problem out to other products in the Q. The plan to reduce project time across the board will decrease retention and morale, as reps need reassurance that they may one day escape the drudgery that is their existence. New hires seem like an expensive gamble, especially with the current retention rate. It’s a difficult problem, and it’s above me. Maybe have some reps only learn low call volume Qs but have them learn them all instead of cross-training them in a product that will completely negate their previous trainings. — HR and Leaders that conducts interview need to be more proactive about communicating what stage of the process an interviewee is at. The lack of communication is what soured my opinion of this company the most. I went from a bright-eyed new rep trying to contribute anything I could to making other employees laugh at dark, inappropriate jokes about TR’s problems, after only two such interview experiences. I would rather be told to my face that I didn’t get the job, then get ghosted for 6 months while noticing that the job got reposted two times since the interview. Only about half of the hiring managers I’ve talked to have reached out with feedback, and I respect the ones that did all the more for it.

Pros

•The managers are transparent with the workers •Management are respectful •Work environment is business casual (we can wear jeans everyday)

Cons

•Hours during busy season can be rough (There will be 6-day work weeks) •Clients can prove to be difficult at times •There is a learning curve to this job •Some co-workers don't treat this job with respect

Advice to Management

•There are some places within Support that needs attention (For example International) •Please raise the bar for the new hires back to getting at least an Associate's degree

Pros

Nice facility great perks overall good company

Cons

Sales can be a meat grinder

Pros

Great teammates and work environment. Highly competent manager. Encouraged to explore other job positions within the company, including participation in job rotations. Mentoring available.

Cons

Seemingly constant corporate restructuring. Technology not always as good as expected.

Pros

Great benefits. Many departments and openings available for transition, if desired.

Cons

Looking back, it was the epitome of working in the "corporate world".