Commonwealth Financial Network Reviews

The issues with Commonwealth are all over the place. CEO forcing return to office despite managers, directors, and VPs agreeing "our teams work best when remote". Your coworkers are either remote or in another state, so you'll end up on video calls anyways, struggling to hear yourself above everyone else calls around you. Execs are constantly talking about 'building culture' , but there's nothing to show for it. Employees have no time to attend anything during work hours and no energy to attend anything afterwards. Stock options are no longer given to all employees meeting their work expectations, just the top 3 per department, despite management advocating against this policy. The annual bonus has gone from 15-20% to ~5%. They tried to disguise this by splitting what we used to get into 2 additional bonuses throughout the year tied to customer satisfaction levels, ignoring that those levels will never be hit due to chronic understaffing and overpromising to clients. Some departments used to have multi-month training plans that are getting cut down to weeks, and clients can tell. With all of this, Commonwealth has continued to drain itself of talent as people see the writing on the wall. Their most recent Employee Survey had no room to provide criticism/improvement, a stark change from prior years' surveys.

Imagine working with your FTE colleagues from New Jersey, Rhode Island, Texas, Florida, and other states who all have work from home exceptions, but because you’re in MA or near San Diego, you have to be in the office 3 days a week for arbitrary reasons. I’m not against coming into the office each week, but with how much this is being micromanaged, it’s insane, belittles previous accomplishments, and is making people feel sick. Wayne, the CEO has nothing better to do than check employee attendance non-stop and micromanage the most minute details, such as forcing employees to fill out their biography on the internal site, or having them remove jackets from their chairs. Working in Technology requires flexibility when dealing with the unexpected, and we’ve been beyond flexible for the last 3+ years despite the numerous challenges, performing work after normal business hours, putting out fires, dealing with incompetence from Advisor360, and staying up late to perform changes. If you want us to waste hours commuting that’s fine, however, the employees in other states then need to handle everything after hours, so we’re setting a fair standard across the department. If I get in a car and spend an hour in traffic each way into the office, my day is done when I get home, and that’s not just me saying this, but I’ve heard this from many other IT people. The company may have pulled off the biggest scam of all time with the new performance/merit review system they put in place this year, so they can pay employees less in the long run. For most employees, the yearly bonus is reduced by half, as it’s based on a service score number that could take years to achieve again. Most normal employees received a 10% increase at the beginning of the year to compensate for the new bonus system, but when pay is already on the lower end across the board, inflation is high, and now there are additional commuting costs, it feels terrible. Chances are the company is not going to properly adjust pay in the new year, and a lot of people they are going to make less with these factors. If you’re reading this and are interested in any position within Technology, stay away, unless you’re given a golden ticket to work from home full time. That way you won’t be exposed to the toxicity of the CEO in person or the decaying culture of the company. Many tenured employees have left the company this year to no surprise, and everything is just becoming a shell of what it once was.