- The company doesn’t care about you as an employee. It’s the shareholders who matter, not the employees.
There’s 2 big examples of this:
The 1st and most famous example is the Board of Director's decision to cut employee’s salaries by 20% earlier this year whilst refusing to cut the dividend. They blamed coronavirus but that was merely an excuse; and, even if it was true, the company should have cut the dividend first.
Since then, they announced superb Q1 results, had tons of negative press, and none of their competitors followed suit, which led to the reversal of the decision in the end. But the fact still remains they were going to cut employee pay, rather than shareholder dividends.
The 2nd and less well-known example is the 2019 hiring freeze which led to a deterioration in everyone’s wellbeing within the company, as all of us were more overworked, more underpaid, and more stressed out than ever. The senior management all knew this but they did not care. With the WTW acquisition being their goal, they were probably pleased that tons of brokers eventually jumped ship.
- Overworked and Underpaid
Salaries were beneath the market rate and would barely increase each year. Instead bonuses were used to reward success and hard work.
While this may sound alright, it’s frustrating as a younger employee, because it’s your base pay that’s important when it comes to getting a mortgage. I was far from alone in feeling this way, and I saw many talented young brokers effectively forced to leave the company because the base pay increases were so poor and they wanted to become a home owner.
Due to the poor pay increases, there’s a high churn of employees, as everyone who has worked for Aon for a few years eventually feels exploited, being paid far less than their value to the company, and competitors offer big pay increases to come join them.
- The performance review and pay review processes are a complete joke.
They claim that the former (a rating out of 5) influences the latter but the anecdotal evidence doesn’t back this up. Instead the key driver for your pay review will be dependent on how Aon has performed as a company, how well your massive Department has done as a whole, etc. This has led to everyone regularly joking within the company that almost anything can be used as an excuse for a disappointing pay review season. 0% pay increases were commonplace some years.
- No career planning
Whilst my department admittedly had a very flat structure, there was no formal career planning to explain how you could get from X to Y.
Instead if you consistently put the hours in, performed to a consistently high standard, proactively pushed the conversation yourself, and also had a bit of luck, you would get promoted (often unofficially first). Without ALL of the above you’re likely to do the exact same job role for a very long period of time, and could be forgiven for thinking there’s no career development at all.
- There's a deliberate strategy to employ less brokers than what's required.
As a result of all teams being under-resourced and the work / life balance is pretty awful.
This meant that when there was an incredibly long hiring freeze for most of 2019 the already under-resourced teams become even more under-resourced, as the company refused to replace those who left, forcing those of us who stayed there to take on more and more work. Consequently, there were many of us putting in 15+ hours overtime each week, week after week, month after month…with no end date or reason given!
What made matters worse is that we were not compensated for these extra hours at all. Instead we were merely promised to be rewarded at the next pay review in March 2020.
Knowing what the pay reviews are like, many chose Not to wait around and instead looked for the exit, resulted in loads of departures in late 2019 / start of 2020.
- Brokers are forced to spend an unusually high % of their time doing admin.
Since 2017, Aon’s brokers have had to produce all their your own slips and endorsements, as part of a cost-cutting drive to get rid of broker support technicians. The IT system is rather painful to use. Consequently the less tech-savvy old school brokers either did not bother or - if forced to use the system - they left Aon altogether!
In addition to that, brokers are expected to file loads of emails for every single placement, using an IT system that is rather slow and only permits you to file 20 emails at a time. Failure to keep up to date will have negative consequences at performance and pay reviews. This added to the already crazy workload.
- Aon dislikes London market style broking!
Despite being based right opposite Lloyd's of London, the company encourages remote broking and frowns upon there being too much face-to-face negotiation, even though it is the latter which is undeniably what is best for most clients, and it is often more efficient to just walk around Lloyd's and get deals done there and then.