Wells Fargo

The best things about Wells Fargo are:

• Flextime
• Casual dress
• Benefits

There are many opportunities for lateral career moves, so this is a good place for younger workers to work their way up from lower paying jobs to medium ones. People are generally nice.

Wells Fargo has consistently worked to create a positive atmosphere for diversity, and the best measure of that is that the company does recognize that it still needs to make improvements in that area.

Now among the top 4 or 5 largest banks in the world, Wells Fargo continues to grow the business with long-term goals in mind rather than seeking short-term profits.

In summary, Wells Fargo is a perfectly okay place to work.

The company is experiencing growing pains from the 2009 merger with Wachovia. A new company culture is still forming. There are many extremely talented mid-career employees who are not reaping the financial benefits of their hard work, and there are not many opportunities for advancement.

At times, the workplace begins to feel more like working at a government agency, with a tendency to focus more on process than innovation and managing towards the average as opposed to the exceptional. The company certainly enjoys the fruits of the labor of high-performance work and creativity, but generally (although certainly not always) treats all employees, the average and the best, alike.

Starving for the right tools, information, data, and clear management direction, the work environment sometimes feels like a grand Darwinian organizational survival of the fittest game without the necessary extinctions that should go along with it. Finally, employee compensation is slow to approach market averages.

1. Hire more college grads and fewer contractors.
2. Divest in expensive process-focused business practices.
3. Reward talent and innovation, and pay severance packages for average to low performers.
4. Create a culture of candor and directness.
5. Make hard, centralized decisions.