Best corporate place to work, but still a corporate place to work - Commercial Underwriter Acuity Insurance Employee Review

3.0
Dec 13, 2024
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Work from home, excellent health benefits, generous contributions to HSA, generous contributions to 401k, fun events.

Cons

Acuity brags about unlimited sick days, but this is mostly only beneficial for those rare illnesses that require long-term treatment. Most people take 0-2 sick days per year. But Acuity boasts about the unlimited sick days because the vacation time is pretty bad - you have to work at Acuity for 16 years to get 4 full weeks of vacation. Funeral leave is limited to immediate family/inlaws only, so if you have an aunt, uncle, cousin, or best friend die, you have to use the limited amount of vacation you have to attend their funeral and grieve for them. Whenever you do take vacation, you are stressed ahead of time trying to get your work out, but no one manages your queue or email while you’re gone, so your work piles up and you are stressed trying to catch up when you get back. There are no incentives - your pay is the same whether you did a lot of projects/mentored a new employee for 6 months/wrote a lot of new business/etc or whether you did the bare minimum just to get by. You do not get bonuses. When employees leave for other companies and then come back, they get paid more than those who've been loyal to Acuity and have stayed for years. Unlike a lot of insurance carriers, underwriters at Acuity do not have assistants or help in any way. You do everything, from the smallest processing task to being logged into a call center where any agent or insured can call to ask questions or ask for quotes their UW hasn’t given them yet, all the while being expected to also act as sales by sending gifts to your agents and going into their offices for visits, all the while being expected to actually underwrite the business that is coming in and help Acuity grow to $6b. Acuity tells their employees they “love them” by sending them candy and rubber chickens in the mail, while agents get airpods, knife sets, vacuum cleaners, etc, on top of their commissions and contingency checks. You are sometimes denied time off around the holidays in order to be available for agents and insureds in case they need to call the call center.

Explore other reviews about Acuity Insurance

5.0
Jul 20, 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

- Excellent benefits including great healthcare, dental, vision, 10.5% of your salary into your 401k annually (without having to put anything in yourself), HSA contributions (Acuity pays $3.4K annually into a family account), unlimited sick days, etc. You'll be hard-pressed to find a better benefits package. - Compensation has improved over the years. When we were losing employees to other carriers over pay, we made adjustments. During high inflation after Covid, Acuity gave every employee a mid-year 5% increase to help. - We attract top talent throughout our 31 state footprint. I learn new things every day from working with some of the best people in the industry. - Acuity takes care of their employees. We have numerous stories of serious illness, tragedies, and other life events where Acuity shows up for their employees in meaningful ways to support us. - Great flexibility and work/life balance. Employees can work remotely, there is flex time, working hours are flexible. Many of our employees are able to coach high school sports, volunteer, be on school boards, etc. I have never not been able to make my kid's events or miss an appointment because of work. - Access to officers. Quarterly exec exchanges where a small group of employees meets with 1-2 officers at a time to ask any questions we want, including Melissa. Officers are accessible via email, Teams, phone and they actually answer you. - Our home office building is incredible. It includes a fitness center open to employees 24/7, a fieldhouse with basketball courts, pickleball courts, volleyball, futsal, tennis, a golf simulator, and games like air hockey, pool, shuffleboard, etc. which also is available 24/7 to employees on our families. Every Wednesday employees receive free breakfast, lunch, dinner, and a happy hour with soda, beer, wine, and cocktails. Families are invited to Wednesday dinners, every Wednesday. We have random little touches in our home office like a beautiful outdoor walking path that goes throughout out meticulously maintained grounds, ponds with seating, a garden for employees to plant whatever they want, parking garages to keep our cars out of Wisconsin snow storms, ping pong tables, pianos, world class art, I could go on and on. - Acuity offers significant opportunities for growth and career advancement. The company has ambitious goals and plenty of untapped potential, creating opportunities for people who are willing to step outside their comfort zone, learn across departments, take on new challenges, and speak up, even when every idea is not ultimately adopted. - This is by far the best place I have ever worked. Is it perfect? No, but we have really good people through out the organization from the officers to the frontline. We also do a good job of appointing great independent agencies to work with.

Cons

- We are a legacy insurance carrier with legacy systems that we make work but it can be frustrating to make changes to. - We are hesitant to create incentive structures for our best performing employees out of a perception of fairness. Our best employees get tapped on over and over again for additional work without additional pay. - Our officers can feel out of touch with front line employees sending what they perceive as "whimsical" happy birthday videos, vague examples of employees going above and beyond, or short thank you videos to a whole department with a bunch of b-roll footage for achieving outstanding results with no sort of reward tied to it. - We are guilty of chasing the next big project or strategic initiative before we finish others. Prioritization among projects is not always clear. - We really struggle identifying poor performers, having honest conversations with them, and helping them improve or moving on.

2.0
Jul 26, 2026
Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

401k and HSA contributions, great health insurance, work remotely, Flex Time.

Cons

The culture of the company has changed. It was a great place to work, where people came in ready to work as a team and in return felt genuinely appreciated. Now the emphasis is not on the employees that got the company to where it is but on becoming more of a national presence and increasing in size. Lots of micromanaging of employees, who are more of a number than anything. There is nothing wrong with growth and change but not at the expense of the employees. Most areas are very flat with little opportunity to move up. The same favored people get all the opportunities. In some cases it relates to those that play sports together tending to all move up. Forced time to come into the office for lots of non-work activities is a waste of company resources and turns off many people who are more introverted. Consultants are brought in to change things and never really talk to the people actually doing the work.

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