I used to work at State Farm. I worked nine years as a State Farm employee. I quit the summer of 2017. I worked in Injury during my last year. While I was not laid off, I felt as if my hand was forced. There are a number of factors that made me throw in the towel: poor treatment of me as an employee; unethical if not illegal business practices; and poor treatment of the policyholder.
First, I would like to say when I started with State Farm; I was proud to be a State Farm employee. In training, the trainers always talked about going the extra distance for the customer and how good the company was to its employees. My first few years, it seemed that the company was doing good to satisfy its employees and policyholders. Continuing insurance education was constantly encouraged along with policies that supported the additional learning. The company was willing to pay for multiple retakes of an exam. These policies changed to the current one. The learning and development department has become leaner with more unforgiving policies. Employees are only allotted so much time per year for learning and development.
Poor treatment of me as an employee.
I have been going to school for 3 years and State Farm was always accommodating to my schedule. Then in Injury, I asked for an accommodating schedule such as I always had. I was told that I would have to use my time off and take 15 - 30 minutes of my PTO to use every time that I had to go to school. I constantly asked for schedule changes. Management would not accommodate; instead, my team manager said that I would have to appeal my decision to the claim manager who was above my section manager. He said that the most likely outcome would be that I would have to continue taking PTO. Also, I knew that if one of my co-workers would not get a more manageable schedule on account of her children, then I knew I was fighting a futile battle with regards to my work schedule. I found out that team work is only team work until I was out of the office. God forbid if I was sick because I would come into an excess of twenty voicemails for being out one day. Getting time off was worse than trying to get a bill passed through Congress. We were always told that the needs of the customer determined when people could be off. When asked for the metrics to support such a need, my team manager said that we could not look at the metrics or question them. Other offices such as those in Newark, Lincoln, or Birmingham always got preferential treatment. Before I became an injury claim specialist, I was a total loss claim specialist. While total loss was consolidating. my then team manager told us to consider looking for other jobs. Upper management then got upset at how low our morale was because of this.
Unethical /possibly illegal activities.
During my tenure as a claim representative in ACC and total loss, I found out that at that current time State Farm would not investigate fraud involving auto property damage losses less than $9,000, especially if the suspicious losses involved certain minority groups.
During my tenure as an injury rep., my team manager let people speak of how they were successful in settling injury claims. One claim specialist said that she lied so that she would settle low in her range of value. This was not rebuked by my team manager and the TM said something along the lines "you have to do what you have to do." She and other of my former teammates felt that the claims of others were much higher. There was an attitude that any means to settle a claim and settle as low as possible was good. Additionally, pressure came from upper management that our valuations were still too high, so management wanted to listen in our negotiations. Before I left, I had the understanding that State Farm is working on developing programs to suggest the valuation of claim for third parties to replace the valuation of a State Farm employee. Of course, management is saying that an employee can go against the valuation in certain circumstances, but management has been known to lie. Ironically, when it comes to settling claims with an employee State Farm has different approaches, especially if they have connections with management. I will note that this one employee that I knew because of his claim settled a pre-existing knee injury that had been allegedly exacerbated in an accident for over $40k. (There was very little documentation to support such an amount, but the employee complained and management was acquiescent.) That same employee a couple years later, got me as a claim specialist, and for a minor accident I valued that employee's claim low based on the facts of the claim. The employee contacted me directly through my email about his claim and had the expectation that his claim should get my undivided attention before anyone else's claim. (At the time, this was against company protocol, I'm unsure if this has changed.) The employee complained to my management about my negotiating because it was not in his favor, my team manager was a friend of the employee and had the claim moved to a different segment. I found out that the employee settled for higher than my evaluation. It seems perverse to me that State Farm treats some people better than others when as a company they should treat every person equally whether first party, third party, employee, or non-employee. If this had been a third-party claimant or even some other first-party policyholders, management would have been congratulating me on my evaluation.
In my segment of injury, we were overworked. There was a re-alignment so that the more "experienced" performers were moved off the team. These people had worse numbers than I did. Once that occurred, my numbers on the white board were among the bottom performers. Another peer and I had more claims than other members of our team, and because we had so many claims to manage, the other metrics such as number of calendars, availability, etc. followed. We were told to take the laptop home so we could work outside of the office or we were told to come and work overtime. On top of managing our own claims, management wanted us to answer everyone else's incoming phone calls that were bouncing around because of the volume of work.
I knew claim personnel that worked at their desks during their lunches and would be willing to assist their peers during their lunches because that was about the only down time they had to provide such assistance. On the other hand, I knew of claim associates who had such an easy work load that they could watch episodes of "Orange is the New Black" on a daily basis. I did not have the luxury of free time. Management complained that no one would make good liability decisions, that we were overpaying people for their injury claims, and management pushed us to encourage less personal contact between State Farm personnel (think auto estimators) and our customers. During my exit interview, I did not tell the HR person about people using their lunch time to service claims because I would want that employee to retain the right to sue instead of be fired.
Poor treatment of the policyholder.
Over time, State Farm has become more disrespectful of the policyholder. They believe in adulterated growth such that underwriting losses are so great that they warrant the rise in premium prices and which then that expense gets blamed on the employees. They have automated so many processes such that it is hard to have just one person to handle a claim. They have forced out many experienced workers to get cheaper and less knowledgeable claim handlers, this means that policyholders get a crappier experience because the company treats claim handling like the manufacturing of widgets. One manager told me, if 80% of people have a good experience, who cares about the 20% that do not. The processes in place are for the 80%, the people that do not have complicated claims.
There is so much more that I can say, but I have other things to do. Just my two cents.