Howden Reviews

3.8

67% would recommend to a friend

(584 total reviews)

David Howden

84% approve of CEO

62% positive business outlook

Howden has an employee rating of 3.8 out of 5 stars, based on 584 company reviews on Glassdoor which indicates that most employees have a good working experience there. The Howden employee rating is in line with the average (within 1 standard deviation) for employers within the Insurance industry (3.6 stars).

Reviews by job title

584 reviews
1.0
20 Mar 2022
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Some interesting projects Good cafe in the office

Cons

To succeed here you need to become a narcissist and leave any sense of morality at the door. Poor behaviors, bluster, arrogance and smarmy theft of credit from others is rewarded, often handsomely. Internally teams fight each other for business, there's no sense of fair play, and anything goes - just as long as the $s keep rolling in. Keep selling at all costs, keep growing the account, it doesn't matter if its unsustainable, or not in you clients actual direct interests, you'll still get a nice bonus. The company spends a fortune on positive PR and sponsoring events to make it look like a credible option to the large brokers. It speaks about being 'people first', and 'employee owned', when actually it's people are given pay freezes and fired at will - people are treated like commodities. The company keeps changing its name, its strategy and direction - read into that what you will. Graduates are promised so much but in reality given photocopying and tea making duties. Some escape and get good managers, vast majority want to leave. Those that have made it to the top live in fear of being ousted by their underlings, its a fear culture and an unhealthy place for those that value their sanity. So many senior managers just 'disappear' via NDAs. If you stick around too long you'll become one of them, it turns good people into bad actors. Avoid.

1.0
23 Aug 2022

Toxic Workplace

Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Work from home if you discuss this in the interview stages.

Cons

Toxic workplace, they glamorise overworking employees with 0 reward. Managers will be sending you work at 11PM-12AM. Extremely high turnover as managers/consultants don’t know the basics of how to treat or speak to people well. Poor pay for the amount of work you’re expected to take on. Poor training. No chance of career progression. Team lacks any structure. Terrible work place culture, definitely not ‘people first’.

1.0
25 Mar 2022

HX - A failed experiment

Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

- “Fast moving” - “Entrepreneurial” - Parts of the company were better than others - free tea/coffee

Cons

- Was a highly stressful working environment caused primarily by poor management behaviours and bullying. - Lots of mundane work, HX had very little, if any innovation. Vest majority of products had been built elsewhere before! - No real business strategy, acquiring brokers and trying to integrate data without any kind of serious plan, is not going to work! - Grand marketing visions actually had very little content, this disconnect between reality, translated into a stressful working environment for those told to “make things happen”. - Lack of competency in management, where bad people were hired into the big roles. Their salesmanship was not a substitute for competence, and was eventually discovered, at great expense to the firm. - unwillingness for management to make the difficult decisions around “the how”, as it grated against their narrative. Personal face took precedence over anything else. - No real collaboration between teams, other than a few units that cut through the BS. - Bonus structures encouraged staff to work against each other. - Tech stack was built on sand, hardly cutting edge, often timeliness prioritised over quality of products.

Viewing 1 - 3 of 584 Reviews

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