Aon reviews

There is no thought from leadership on how to get anything done. Strategy is set at such a high level globally that it never passes down to anyone who actually does work. And the strategy lacks any sort of substance and often means nothing. The global message is Deliver Aon United but even departments who have offices 100km apart don’t do the same thing or even talk to each other. In 50 years I’ve never know a company who is less United in their approach of anything compared to Aon. Every team, region, department, business line does their own thing. The hole company is held together with sticking plaster. The company values new D&I hires more than existing colleagues. Minorities get promoted faster than historic majorities. If you are of the historic majority you won’t get promoted. People are over worked and under appreciated and there is a culture of ‘once you are senior enough you can dump on anyone below you without consequence’. Aon invests heavily in mental health medical support because it creates so many mental health problems with its colleagues because of the stressful working environment and the pressure it puts people under. There are countless stories of people going off sick for mental health reasons and never coming back. There is a lot of fake success reported and idea theft. Many senior people lie about progress of projects to ‘look successful’. The culture is very toxic.

*The workload is high and the pay is lower than insurance (at least for the associates). There is (are) a "busy season(s)", which gets pretty intense (consistent 50 hours of actual client work weeks to 80-90+hours). In the regular "chill" season, the hours can be from low-40 to mid-50s. If you have actuarial exams to study, good luck. *Although working in different teams can help you gain diverse workstyle from different PMs, it can be a challenge to receive recognition from your direct manager if your direct manager isn't your PM. *Bonus is pretty low for associates, so after sweating numerous overtime, you get an offensively low bonus (usually 90% of an already low target bonus). *Raises/bonus transparency is pretty low. You may be working hours and hours while having no idea how much your work will be rewarded (or even remembered). *Really high turnover. So picking up work and deciphering through old emails from past colleagues (who left) can get challenging and damage team morale. *Work can get pretty tedious and mind-numbing. There were attempts to make many mind-numbing processes more efficient but with so many urgent client deliverables, it's hard to work on improving them. *Mediocre retirement benefits. No 401k for the first year and starting in year 2, you can get up to a 4% match (but pretty confusing layout). But if you leave before 2 years of service, you lose all company matches. Pretty subpar benefit for associates working in retirement benefits (a bit ironic). *Not pro/con but this review is for Aon HR/retirement consulting. Different departments don't interact much with each other and may have different compensation and culture. So maybe Aon Risk, reinsurance, or health solution lines may treat their employees more humanely.