Was anyone able to make sense out of that? They “will be launching a department wide skills and interests mapping exercise. Each employee will take a comprehensive survey of legal and broad-based skills and interests. They will capture your current level of expertise and your interest levels for key skills across the department. Survey results will be used in the selection of employees for several cross functional initiatives including One year rotations in different practice groups.” No snarky remarks, please. They aren’t helpful. Lots of people are worried about their jobs.
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The email says taking the survey is “strongly encouraged” but it’s not anonymous as your “Law Department officers and your manager will be able to view your survey results.” So if you refuse to take it, what happens? Your lead counsel, state and regional managers know and you get moved to the top of the chopping block (in August or October?)?
I agree Allstate will use the results as a way to save money: a stop gap to assist with their decision on how many more people they can layoff and in what positions, and have various duties reassigned, perhaps by piecemeal, to other personnel within or possibly out of state.
But this is great service to their insureds? I’ve been told my friends and family for years to never insure their homes or vehicles with Allstate. If they are ever sued, they will not have proper legal representation due to the sheer volume in caseload per attorney alone.
Does Allstate not realize their best “sales” people are their own employees and perhaps that’s why Allstate is falling behind the pack? Our friends and family are listening to us?
The email went out to the entire Law & Reg/legal department. There may be cross-department training work share options in Corporate Legal, but not Staff Counsel. I agree with the optimistic interpretation in that Allstate is looking to elevate the skills of its existing employees, rather than as a tool to eliminate folks. The dead weight in each office is already known to management as this should be apparent in their PDS.
This whole "agile" thing is a bunch of corporate BS. Some professor wrote a book about it that has Harold/Gerard and other leaders positively giddy, it's almost like they're getting a kickback from the author for every copy of the book they help sell. I don't see any innovation right now in the company- we're looking outside for ideas/copying what other companies are doing and buying new customers. That should be all the info you need to tell you about your future with Allstate.
I hope customers are panicked at the loss of attorneys to protect their interests…
I tell everyone I know to stay as far away from the cesspool known as allsnake as possible….
I am now the “anti Allstate” ambassador…do Inget a little blue tag on my email??
Layoffs are on the horizon in Legal. This is a solidified thing. You will get your assessment in the next coming weeks and first round of layoffs is August, next round is October.
Do you read this forum? Obviously it’s an assessment. They did this to auto last year and shuffled some of us to different roles for a few months (subro, etc). The assessment is a personality test (what would you do in this scenario kinda stuff) and ours had a fun shapes puzzle (no I’m not being “snarky” it really did). They allegedly use them to decide who to lay off and who to keep and/or shuffle around.
That is more or less the same email that was put out to areas that were assessed and that layoffs hit in 2020. The difference in the assessment process is it will be more "self" focused since they cannot use the exact same assessment format two years in a row. I hear there is no puzzle this year. Most of us in claims areas will be getting similar emails in July.
Hmmm. I didn’t get that email, but it sounds as if it’s going along with them not wanting to lay people off, but “re-purposing” them so they still have a job. We have two girls in our unit from other areas of the country. That of course after two people were laid off. Go figure! 🤷♀️
Yes, these are part of the talent assessment initiative. They are using these to weed out people from legal. This is a very real and scary thing happening. Any snarky comments are just from people afraid to see the truth as to what is coming. Attorneys are leaving my SCO every week because the writing is on the wall. The next step after this is the email about "reevaluating our officewide needs", which means layoffs. I would definitely get your resume up to date and start looking while you have a job still rather than later. Best of luck. I am in the same boat.
My most cynical interpretation of this would be that they plan to use employees from your department to temporarily fill positions as a stopgap while they are completing the outsourcing process for those positions. This would allow them to spare the expense of hiring new US direct hire employees (if they can even convince people to take jobs at Allstate at this time) and spread out the layoffs of people in your department.
My most optimistic interpretation of this would be that they plan to cross train people in your department as a cost cutting initiative or to fill positions they are having difficulty filling. So you would be trained to do additional tasks that are currently done by another department/position or temporarily transfer to the other position .
As for the first part about the exercise/survey-I suspect that is along the lines of the assessment. In other words, a way for Allstate to CYA (CTA?) for why person A was selected versus person B when person B has much better stats, longer tenure, etc.