First Merchants Design Department Employee Reviews
Briefly describe your overall experience at your company
Review from Design Dept
What do you like best about the leadership team?
There is a genuine interest from them to us. As if there are no differences from one person to the next, no split in tax brackets, we're all treated equally on every level.
Review from Design Dept
My direct leadership team trusts the people they hired to do the jobs they were hired to do and never claim ownership of our work and allow their employees to own and present it.
Review from Design Dept
The leadership team which I report up through in the Consumer Bank is great. They are strategic, assertive, focused on driving positive change, and treat their teams well.
Review from Design Dept
What does the leadership team need to get better at?
Need to focus on other growth strategies outside of acquisitions
Review from Design Dept
Our leadership team needs to get better at strategy. This company has no strategic alignment, and instead they focus on developing tactics and solutions. Our only strategy is acquisition, but the rest of the house is falling apart.
Review from Design Dept
Our technology is absolutely terrible. The gear, the network, the organization, and the tech leadership is going to be the downfall of this organization. We are not supporting our bankers or our customers from a technology standpoint. It's severely outdated and poorly built.
Review from Design Dept
Strategy. The company seems to focus on acquisitions as the sole growth vehicle, and we are losing customers because we don't spend time, effort, and care in developing a growth or retention strategy. We lose customers as fast as we get them. Not sustainable.
Review from Design Dept
What is the best part about your compensation package?
It's a fair and livable compensation.
Review from Design Dept
The pay and time flexibility I have.
Review from Design Dept
Why do you feel undervalued and what would make you feel better about your compensation?
Our health benefits are the worst that I've ever had at a job. For my role, my pay is not competitive with the market.
Review from Design Dept
In my role in other industries (and my role is industry-agnostic), I could be making an additional $50-60k additional on my base salary. I lose candidates to join my team all the team because our pay is about 25% lower than the industry averages.
Review from Design Dept
I am underpaid based on what my role makes in the marketplace. Also, the budget for hiring new roles in my field is not sufficient to get high-quality employees with experience.
Review from Design Dept
In my role, I am undercompensated when compared to the market. The new roles on my team are not given compensation for me to recruit competitive talent. Our department is drastically underfunded and undervalued when it comes to shaping the ecosystem that our customers expect from a modern bank.
Review from Design Dept
The market has changed and our salaries have not kept up with the changing demand in my specialty or with inflation. Most of the candidates I interview for roles on my team are at par or higher than the director's salary I receive. I could easily make 20-30% more if I sought an opportunity outside.
Review from Design Dept
What are some of the best things about your team?
Willingness to learn new things. We all can pull from each other.
Review from Design Dept
They are very genuine and caring people.
Review from Design Dept
What do your coworkers need to improve and how could you work together better?
We are too focused on executing "tactics" and not focused enough on solving problems. Most people do "what is easy" and not "what is right" because doing what is right takes more work.
Review from Design Dept
Generally, people are trying to do work that is "good enough" and just get through the day. We are not focused on delivering high-quality or innovative work. People are fairly stagnant and just want their jobs to be "easy" instead of productive.
Review from Design Dept
The general approach and attitude of employees is very self-interested. Many do not work together well as a team, and there is a focus on doing what is "easy" and not on "what is right for the customer."
Review from Design Dept
Many of the coworkers have old school mentalities and simply do what they've always done without evolving with modern needs, expectations, capabilities, technologies, etc. When I first started here, I was underwhelmed with the expertise exhibited by many - particularly in tech.
Review from Design Dept
The coworkers in my department are great! Some of the cross-functional teams which I interact with on a daily basis are unexperienced, unmotivated, and immature. I consistently deal with pettiness and territorial people. It hinders the company's ability to execute on new and important initiatives.
Review from Design Dept
What is most positive about the culture and environment at your company?
As I mentioned in the leadership question. Everyone is treated like we all grew up together. Friendly atmosphere, openness to lifestyles, ideas and progressive thinking make for a very positive environment. We are fortunate with FMB.
Review from Design Dept
Work primarily remote and support development growth.
Review from Design Dept
Our team has a great culture and has great people, but we do not fit in with the rest of the company. We are trying to do what is right, but the company keeps pushing back.
Review from Design Dept
What needs to change to make the company culture better?
People need to be less focused on "what they own" and be more focused on having success as an org.
Review from Design Dept
We need to be focused on strategy, high-quality work, and be open to new ideas. We shut down ideas before they even have a chance because we are a "small" bank without any budget. People are stuck in the mindset of "we do it that way because we always have."
Review from Design Dept
We need goals and a strategy to rally behind. We need to ramp up our expertise, we need more / better data to inform our decision-making, we need to feel like we are making the changes that are needed to achieve forward momentum for the bank.
Review from Design Dept
Some teams (not within the Consumer Bank) need to be more open to collaboration and need to accept when they have shortcomings. There is a lot of jockeying for control, a ton of politics, and people are not willing to share information, data, or processes. Territorialness is choking our progress.
Review from Design Dept
What did you like most about the interview process?
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What would you improve about your company's interview process?
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What makes you most happy at work?
Innovation in the line of work I perform.
Review from Design Dept
My team and doing accessibility work to improve our platforms and experiences for our users.
Review from Design Dept
What's going wrong and how can it be improved?
People are so focused on their own jobs and their own egos that they forget to care about the success of the bank. Cross-functional teams are not supportive, they slow down projects, and take credit for others' work. Instead of handling issues, they escalate to their executives.
Review from Design Dept
Our bank's technology and overarching approach is not sustainable. The strategy of acquisition is not sustainable. We need to focus on growing our bank organically and shift our focus to "customer first."
Review from Design Dept
We are making small bits of progress here and there, but the bank needs to modernize. We need to understand our customers better, we need to provide them with better solutions, and we need to provide our employees with better tools that are easier to use.
Review from Design Dept
We are decades behind customer expectations. Our IT infrastructure is nebulous and poorly executed. Our vendor-supported customer platforms are outdated, clunky, and difficult to use. Most of our customer population is aged, and we are not doing anything to meet modern-day customer expectations.
Review from Design Dept
What do you like best about your company?
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What would you most like to see improved at your company?
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