Delusions of Grandeur - Anonymous employee Morningstar Employee Review

2.0
Dec 4, 2020
Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

You can't beat the 6 week sabbatical after 4 years and the 7% 401k match. You get to learn a lot in a short amount of time, and there are some genuinely good people who work here. I've made lifelong friends! If you're lucky, you'll have a manager who understands the egos of the executives at this company, and protect you from the inevitable fallout in project execution, unreasonable deadlines, and open bullying that can sometimes go on. The education stipend is awesome and you can use $1k however you want with manager approval, which isn't hard to get. The office location is second to none and easy to access. The culture of transparency is stellar. People are honest with each other and have hard conversations to tackle "thorny issues." The mission is as good as you can get within financial services. Strong brand. There are some good managers.

Cons

The politics at this company can be utterly exhausting. Whatever an executive wants, goes, and if you dare to ask questions, what I've seen happen is, you're marked as a troublemaker and dogged with micromanagement until you've had enough or you're forced out. It's upsetting to watch this happen a couple of times a year at least and the practice seriously lowers morale because it usually targets some of the best people who are actually creative at the company. The people who have been here for years have grown too comfortable, and the new people in charge have zero emotional intelligence. Stagnation is rampant, and our products reflect that. Customers are buying into the Morningstar brand and reputation, but how long can that last when almost everything we produce isn't even "complete" by the time it hits the market due to agile? It takes years to roll out features that customers ask for, and when these features are finally rolled out there's a lot of self-congratulation, which is just laughable. Training opportunities are few and far between. So that means that people who are new struggle unnecessarily to keep up with the taskmasters' demands. There is usually no support for new team members from management, and they get by thanks to their own intelligence and a small support system of lower-rung employees who have "been there, done that" and are trying to prevent someone else from going through the same thing. If there are training opportunities, they are treated as a box to check. You go through a training and then usually there are no opportunities to apply your learnings and nothing changes. Its just all for show. Morningstar is very adept at putting on a good show, but don't fall for their propaganda saying it's a "great place to work." From the stories I've heard from years past, it USED to be a great place to work, then they hired externals because people left to get more money and the culture has degraded. Also the Morningstar Development Program is a scam. It takes advantage of smart young people who have fallen for Morningstar's strong brand by putting them on customer support duty and having them compete to get an associate level role on any team they can get. It is very hard to rise through the ranks at Morningstar in general and that's another reason why a lot of people leave. You will be paid far less than industry standard. Lots of sucking up to executives and toeing the company line that everything Morningstar does is great and that it can do no wrong. We are supposed to be "daring to disagree" and that is just not happening because "leaders" don't know how to or can't lead properly. This organization is very self-centered and if you don't drink the kool-aid you'll be targeted by management for being different. People here are workaholics and work crazy hours so I'm not sure what the other reviewers are talking about. It is so difficult to get resources to do your job, and when you ask for help/support and are told "just be scrappy" it can be infuriating.

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Morningstar Response
5y
Thank you for sharing your feedback, it’s important to us. Though you shared some very positive feedback in the pros, I’m definitely concerned about your feedback in the cons section. What you have described is certainly not the Morningstar experience we aspire to and it is alarming. It’s especially saddening that you probably felt that you couldn’t share this feedback with your manager or leadership at Morningstar due to a lack of trust and security. For that, I’m very sorry. Morningstar has experienced a great deal of growth and change over the past couple years and with that comes growing pains. However, along the way, what’s always important is remaining true to our mission and values. This has been our guiding light during COVID as we have weathered one of our most challenging years to date. We are continuously looking for ways to enhance our experience at Morningstar for employees and clients through our listening programs and surveys. We have been encouraged to see one of our highest engagement scores to date as well as psychological security. We have a zero tolerance for bullying of any kind in the workplace and should you believe you have been bullied in any way, please reach out to our ethics hotline. There’s always more work to be done and we hope that you would be open to dialoguing with us or sharing more specifics about your experience with us at AskHR@morningstar.com.

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Pros

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Cons

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4.0
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Pros

Really kind people work here, for the most part everyone I have worked with is smart and I have learned so much from them. There are great benefits: unlimited PTO, 6 week paid sabbatical is earned after 4 years of employment, 6 month maternity leave. Great location of an office. Great work life balance.

Cons

Not very competitive pay and it is easy to hit a ceiling in your career development. New HR policies are kind of strange, will not promote you unless you make enough money to be promoted which they designed the system to make it so you cannot go up. HR has also laid people off because they make too much money without considering the consequences of removing senior employees with unique/not stored intelligence vital to the company. They also hired a bunch of remote employees, then implemented a 4 day required in office rule no matter if you live states away from an office, which pushed hundreds of people to quit, not receive their bonus, and not require M* to pay them severance. It didn't use to be this way but the last year or so has been strange.

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