Mercer reviews

Rewards and career development: • The only thing that matters for annual reviews for all but senior leaders is billable hours. While not unexpected in a consulting firm, other professional goals are ignored. As a result, professional development is not supported other than for actuaries to maintain their credentials. Billable hour goals are much higher than non-GHSC Mercer staff for the same career levels. • Non-actuarial employees have a narrow career path at GHSC and are excluded from the opportunity for many leadership positions. Pursuing advanced degrees and other non-actuarial professional development is not valued nor supported. • With the exception of paid time off, employee benefits are poor and not competitive with peer firms. In particular, health insurance contributions are much higher than peers and should be factored in if considering a job offer. • Mid-career staff are often hired for a particular type of work/expertise, but then are assigned projects that they are not qualified for and/or have no interest in doing due to the desperate need to find warm bodies to staff projects. This wouldn’t necessarily be a problem if there was any support for employees in this situation, but there is none. • Annual pay increases are anemic, and promotions have minimal effect on base pay. (Passing actuarial exams does increase base pay, although this leaves out any meaningful base pay increases for all non-actuarial employees). It is common to hear of colleagues leaving for 25-50% raises at other organizations, particularly for more junior-level staff. • Target bonuses are unobtainable, as the bonus pool is never fully funded. This should be factored in if considering a job offer. Bonus payouts are often larger at competitor firms, even if the target bonus is lower. Culture: • GHSC culture is dysfunctional at best and toxic at worst – your experience will largely depend on your manager and client team leaders. Toxicity is a particular problem in the Minneapolis office, where a handful of clients make up almost all work, and it is nearly impossible to avoid the toxic client leaders. • The culture is self-perpetuating in that the people who stay tend to be risk-averse and change-resistant (far more so than the usual actuary personality), and the people who have the ability/desire to push for change don’t stay. The culture is also perpetuated by its insular nature. There is virtually no communication between GHSC employees and all other Mercer employees. It is possible for someone at GHSC to spend decades there working on a single client, leaving them with no exposure to other ways of working, even within GHSC. • The narrow focus on billable hours has led to a culture of inefficiency, over-engineering, an above all a substantial amount of low-value work. Tools and systems are often out-of-date (e.g., Microsoft Access) since replacing them with more efficient tools would reduce revenue. Some projects are sold and completed not because they have any value for clients but solely because they produce revenue. • Culture is entirely top-down. Few staff (even long-tenured, senior employees) have an ability to affect decision-making. Uncreative, risk-averse rule followers are valued, while most dynamic employees who would make great leaders end up taking their talents elsewhere. • Turnover has always been a problem, with 2022’s turnover being so high it severely limited the ability to complete projects. (For example, multiple client teams had more than 50% turnover in less than one year.) Instead of seeking to understand why turnover is persistently high, leadership blame the Great Resignation or blame employees for “not having what it takes” while ignoring the fact that many of those employees have greater career success after leaving GHSC. • Employee retention is a critical problem, especially for mid-career staff. While GHSC does a good job recruiting mid-career staff, many of these people leave within two years, which means they were already considering leaving before they hit their one-year anniversaries. While entry-level staff likely don’t see the dysfunction and toxicity because they have nothing to compare it to, many mid-career realize GHSC is not a good environment and jump ship quickly. It isn’t unusual for mid-career employees to start and then go back to their previous employers less than one year later. • The saddest part about working at GHSC is seeing the employees who have been at GHSC for 15+ years and who have clearly lost all passion for work and are just going through the motions. These people bear no resemblance to their younger selves, and while they are good at their jobs, there is clearly no joy in working. The colleagues in this position I’ve talked to have told me they would like to leave but feel they are too old to make a change so accept that they’ll be at GHSC until they retire. So sad. Leadership: • Senior leaders are like Supreme Court justices – they have their jobs until they retire or quit. This is the foundation for so many of GHSC’s issues. Talented, motivated staff see limited opportunities to advance and so they leave the company. Change is nearly impossible to accomplish, as many leaders haven’t changed their mindset since the turn of the century. Kissing up to leaders and/or not challenging them is incredibly important, because they may have authority over you for decades. • The Peter Principle is on display every day. Many senior staff are in their positions because they’ve outlasted everyone else and have the most client-specific knowledge. But these people are often poor and insecure leaders who drive talented employees out of the organization in search of more responsibility and less micromanagement. Even when client leaders see significant turnover (e.g., one team I worked on had 25% of the team quit in a single month and more than 50% quit over six months), there are no consequences for failed leadership or even recognition that leaders could be at fault for employees’ leaving the company. • Questioning leadership will get you managed out of the organization. Some long-tenured leaders use the acronym CLM (for “career-limiting move") to label employees whom they don’t consider “leadership material” based on refusing to toe the GHSC line at all times. • GHSC has a tendency to hire mid-career staff who have leadership experience on other organizations (as managers and/or department leaders) and turn them into individual contributors at GHSC. The amount of wasted talent I’ve observed is remarkable. This seems to be partly driven by long-tenured, insecure GHSC leaders defending their positions against new and more talented colleagues. (The corollary to this is that subservient employees with no leadership aspirations are overvalued and protected by leaders.) • Leadership botched return to office after the pandemic. They pushed hard for RTO (and pushed managers hard to make their staff RTO) and tried to justify this by touting the impact on productivity RTO would bring. However, half of GHSC senior leaders are full-time telecommuters who don’t even live in a state with a GHSC office. While this contradiction was obvious to employees, leadership never even acknowledged it.