No Balance - Senior Claims Examiner GEICO Employee Review

GEICO uses Plantation Style employee rankings on things that are not necessarily in the control of the employees. You are rated against people as if you work on an assembly line doing the same task over and over again. You are also expected to respond to countless unreasonable and duplicative tasks. You may also find that if you are good at what you do; you will get more work than anyone else. The expectation is that you will remain current regardless of the vacation, sick leave and just work life balance. You are weighed against someone who is handling significantly files less than you. This position is also weighed against the paygrade below despite the severe complexity and differences in the jobs. Over the years, the lower paygrade's workload got easier and easier. Any claim file that was deemed slightly abnormal from the usual workflow, it was sent to us who are were already overwhelmed with complex files. Unfortunately, these complex cases require learning and research outside of your scope of training and knowledge. Most of the time, you will find that management has null experience in what comes across desk. Most supervisors will just guess at random even if their thought contradicts proper claims handling. Management will refuse to acknowledge that employees are not given the same workload. If you handled claims before, you would know that some claims are way more tasking than others. Management will tell you are taking too long on things and yet they never think to try doing the task themselves to see how long it actually takes. Management is terrified to give demonstrations on how to do the job efficiently because they cannot handle the entire expectations of desk work. Supervisors may often refer you to coworkers who have no idea on how to solve the problem. The expectations are laid out clearly to meet your goals which are dependent on many factors that are out of your control. These factors are both internal and external. Management never acknowledges when they are contradicting themselves. The goals of quality and productivity are unrealistic together. Most managers require their own examiners to train them on how to handle the claims systems, state specific laws and various other tasks that they never learned because they lacked the experience. GEICO implemented a horrible system of forcible employee terminations. For all the things that you could be fired for is being overworked. Your supervisor, your manager, your liability director, your regional liability administrator, various higher ups in the home office will system message at times to the brink of collapse. I was often asked to complete 7 to 14 hours of work in one day with systems messages. If you miss 3, you are likely fired. These messages would come back-to-back. Management would wonder why one could not keep their workload current. You will get blamed for not keeping a diary. Forbid you have an unexpected absence, overly complex case or anything come along. You have to predict the future to keep your job. Managers will tell you to stop spending time on things. When you don't take the time and energy, managers will send you a note telling you to do more work on a file which you would have done in the first place if you were not rushed to get through each matter. I was asked often to watch 2-3 other desks at times when I was already handling way more than anyone else. You take a week for vacation; you will not come to anything current. You can only succeed in this position if you dedicate more than 60 hours per week to the job. If you find yourself succeeding doing less time, you are doing something wrong. There are many people who also operated without integrity to float by and still worked excessively. Coworkers have lied about doing things and they make things up that they do not know because they do not have the time. There is a lot of pressure from the higher ups to do such awful things while they are preaching operating principle #4, integrity. You report to too many people in this position. Settlement authority is joke and you are treated like a child in being spoon fed authority even after a decade experience. You will always be treated like a trainee. You will have to climb an extensive hierarchy of management to get a sad sum of settlement authority on such mundane and repetitive types of claims. It provides GEICO no benefit to force examiners with sufficient experience to have to crawl every time they needed money wasting hours on a case that could have been resolved much quicker and sooner. Managers love duplicative work. Almost every meeting could be an email. We had a RLA who handled things by a spreadsheet. She did not often need hours long meetings of pointless time waste to review claim files. If she had a question, she wrote an email and very rarely had to call. This golden time but that has died. All levels of managements now want a round table meeting tying up everyone's time. You write extensive notes that should explain the claim pretty well; therefore, I have to ask this, "Why are we having this meeting?". You are not a family here. You are number in a spreadsheet. You could respected, knowledgeable and someone that many go to for help yet you are dispensable. Sometimes you miss one out of 100 emails on time when are getting about 50 emails a day, on top of new cases that take hours to work, a diary of older cases with 4-6 hours self-assigned for the day, inbound calls and outbound calls, extreme mail volume with legal timeframes attached (often over 100 pages that require review). My last supervisor was a liar to keep her own security. She lied about having my work handled for me in my absences to handle incoming mail. Maybe they worked a few things, but it was not anywhere near what she claimed it to be like when I returned from any approved time off from work. You get more latitude at work if you are heteronormative.