Great Opportunities - Anonymous employee Morningstar Employee Review

Thanks so much for your five-star rating! We don’t take that for granted, and we know even the best have room for improvement, but we appreciate your vote of confidence. It was interesting to see your affirmation of the autonomy and growth opportunities most of us experience at Morningstar. We recently completed some internal research to explore what it means when our employees praise our “flexible” work environment, and one of the most common responses relates to autonomy-- our managers typically don’t “micro-manage” their teams and instead provide sufficient freedom for the individual to manage their work as they see fit. Not surprisingly our team members really appreciate that they’re treated like adults. To your comment about “better structure,” we’re constantly tweaking our organization and the processes by which we work. Sometimes we are criticized for continually reconfiguring and evolving, but we believe that’s necessary in today’s fast-paced market environment. And generally we find our people are very adaptive. So we won’t debate that we can improve our processes, organizations, and teams and, in fact, we’re committed to doing so—forever. During 2016, and continuing into 2017, we put a heavy training focus on the development of our managers as people leaders. We too want them to get better at recognizing the individual strengths and weaknesses of their team members, managing for high-performance, and ensuring a highly-engaging experience for all our people. We’ve seen some signs of progress there, but we want to take that a lot further. So, we appreciate your advice and accept it as reinforcement that we’re headed down the right path. Thanks again for taking the time to share!