Pay and benefits are great but are used to keep people in line – people are too scared to rock the boat for fear of losing a ‘good thing’, consequently the culture is not very innovative or exciting but is simply a ‘do as I say, don’t question it’ environment.
Senior management are completely inept, scared of their own shadows and are powerless when it comes to making any decisions of significance. For the most part decisions are made by committee and then second guessed by the MD, as a result they are slow, very slow.
The MD rules the organisation with an iron rod; senior managers are so scared of stepping out of line and losing their jobs that they are utterly powerless.
People recruited for their skills and expertise often find themselves in roles totally unsuited for them. Talent is not something that is nurtured by the business; it’s only developed if you happen to be lucky to find one of an ever decreasing number of effective managers.
Often you will find managers have less experience and expertise than members of their team(s), but if you are an affective self promoter, skills and experience rarely come into the equation. Much of the development potential at Zurich is based all around ‘perception’ rather than output.
IT systems are prehistoric and there is very little integration as a result. Customer insight is therefore almost non-existent.
Meetings, meetings and more meetings......actual output...not allot. It never ceased to amaze me that people at Zurich got paid huge amounts to simply sit in meetings day after day but not actually produce anything. If I owned the company I could considerably increase profits overnight, simply by removing the multiple layers of management that don’t do anything, other than create more bureaucracy and red tape......it is the most bewildering business model you will ever experience.
Other reviews are correct when they refer to a bureaucratic and political environment. Business units do not work together for one united aim, rather they work against each other. Departments heads continually try to score points off each other in senior leadership meetings and try to public undermine each other. It is not a pleasant place to work, the ‘blame game’ being high on the agenda should anything go wrong...rather than simply learning from mistakes, fixing things and moving on.
Work life balance is poor, with most people putting in hours way over what they are contracted to. This is a characteristic that is unlikely to change as it comes from the MD and is very much their attitude towards work.