Commonwealth Financial Network Reviews

Where to begin... first, the remote work policy. Mandatory 3 days on premises. Last summer, the CEO himself said if you have symptoms of illness and need to work remotely, that's fine, that wasn't the intention of the new policy, and that they weren't going to be counting badge swipes. Now, they're literally doing just that. The company would literally rather your productivity be ZERO and use PTO than have you work remotely if you have a cold but could still work, which completely contradicts the reasoning behind the policy, which was to increase collaboration and improve the advisor satisfaction score. In operations, having a person out of the office means 60-80 cases not getting worked on that day that could have been. Secondly, the policy contradicts the company's illusion of diversity and inclusion. Nobody working an operations job could afford to rent in a town that's truly easily accessible to the office without living with several roommates. Now, consider that a disproportionate number of people of color live in communities that are entirely impossible to reasonably access the office three days a week. To do what? Bury your face in a computer screen to have Teams meetings you could have had at home anyways. The C-level is all white, the CEOs reports are (almost) all white, but there are a few women. There's no reward for hard work. You can score a 4/5 on your annual review and still be punched in the gut with a 3% standard pay increase, which for the record, does not even meet inflation in 2023 to 2024. So essentially, don't bother trying hard, it won't matter anyways. Why? Because even the bonus is garbage. They changed the bonus structure to effectively gut most of the annual bonus, and then proceeded to move the goal posts up until the day our annual reviews and compensation were made available, so even top performers got less than anticipated. It's almost like the poor communication around how the bonus funding and pool would work was completely intentional so they could tailor it to whatever fit a budget they had already predetermined. The company is so focused on their trillion dollar goal, they will sacrifice anything, including incredible talent, employee morale, and their integrity.

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.