Vantaggi
Someone higher up wants employees to be treated like actual people, the core values of the company include things like optimizing work/life balance, and prioritizing employees mental health, etc. They give 5% of your salary to a retirement plan, plus match your contribution 50% up to 5% of your salary, thereby essentially allowing an investment of 12.5% of your salary to a retirement plan, by allocating only 5% of your pay check. There are all kinds of health/life/disability benefits available. Unfortunately for a reasonable coverage for a family it will cost approx. 800$ per month, Sun Life actually gives you a percentage of your salary as flex-benefits which can cover some of these costs, and while the $ is taxable, you may end up only paying 200$ per pay for a family for reasonable health/dental/life/disability/critical illness/accidental death and dismemberment insurance...
Svantaggi
The salaries paid at SLF are lower than most other insurance companies in Montreal. There are many people sprinkled throughout management who don't seem to understand that if you have an increase of 200% of incoming work, that your actual workers may be able to sporatically increase their production efforts but cannot keep up with the increased demand and will slowly faulter, the work will pile up, there'll be a 2 year backlog and people will start to leave, the number of workers will therefore decrease and add to the stress of the employees, they'll do less work because they're unhappy, their sick leave rate will increase and this will result in less work getting done, and so on. SLF needs to hire more people, rather than focus on profits, so that the work gets done. In the past few years much energy has gone into creating a more efficient company, think sigma-six, lean solutions, etc. While the training is helpful and relevant, the company appears to have taken a good thing and squeezed it too hard. The atmosphere in many departments is stressful and understaffed. Ongoing pressure to put effort to produce ideas to increase efficiency works backwards instead of actually creating ideas, it is creating more work. For claims management its all about being a team, which means that you're expected to get a certain number of tasks done per day, and while this is attainable, it won't be enough to keep up with the incoming work. For sanity's sake if you push harder and do more, you'll be rewarded with your team-mate's work, since you're a team you cannot complain because then you're not a team-player. In claims management specifically, not super sure about all other departments, when you take vacation, which you've earned, you actually are responsible for doing all the work which needs to be done in your absence, despite not being at work. It doesn't mean you need to work while you're on vacation, necessarily, but it does mean that the time off, is really just an ability to do the same amount of work in a shorter period of time, since none of your work will be reassigned in your absence. This means when you're preparing for vacation, the weeks leading up to it are more stressful as you inevitably end up putting in extra hours, and when you get back you have weeks of backlogged work that needs to be handled immediately.