Avoid this micromanaging company at all cost. - Customer Claims Specialist II Protective Life Employee Review

This is the most micromanaging company I have ever had the displeasure to work with in my entire 25 year work life. Their singular goal is stats and they will hound and haunt you over them. In my position I pay beneficiary claims for the variable and fixed annuities including IRAs offered through my former employer which was sold to this company in June 2019. The expectation is that you meet 100% of goal and our goal (for the WHOLE claims department) is that you process 6 payout per day every day. The issue with that is my department doesn’t receive 6 completed claim forms per day, let alone ones that are in good order and are ready for processing the selected settlement option. Also given the nature of the death benefits processing not every beneficiary is going to elect for the lump sum of the contract, so the ones who select for the spousal continuation of the contract or to defer the payout as allowed by the IRS don’t count as “payouts”. But nonetheless they expect you to process 6 payouts per day. This stat requirement results in unobtainable goals in my department, but management doesn’t care about the circumstances on why you can’t hit goals. They also have a program installed that will track your every movement within the system down to the second and also logs what you type. The expectation there is that you will be “active” for 85% of the time on this tracking software and if you are not actively typing or clicking on something then you are logged as “idle” within the system. This is an issue because the systems and programs you work with lag so bad that it greatly affects your ability to work in a timely fashion. It took this one system about a hour to generate a letter to 3 beneficiaries, whereas it should only have taken maybe 5 to 10 minutes at max. You also have to deal with incompetent and inept management that care nothing about your troubles, issues or concerns. As an example of this because there is a backlog of life insurance claims they lowered the SLA time from 3 processing days down to 2 under some sort of misguided belief that lowering the SLA will somehow magically make you process claims faster. They also removed the requirement of obtaining a W9 from some beneficiaries when processing a claim. I don’t know what they are going to do when we cannot supply the IRS with a completed W9 when asked as we won’t have one because we didn’t require it from the beneficiary due to this new rule change. Why this rule change? Why this lowering of SLAs to somehow enable us to process claims faster? It’s so executive management can hit their goals so they can get a fat bonus at the end of the year, whereas your bonus will be pennies on their dollar. Yearly wage increase? If you break your back to hit these ridiculous unobtainable goals then you will be able to enjoy your 2% raise, if you get one at all. If you value your home life and mental health you will avoid this company at all cost. Protective Life is the place where dreams go to die.