CoBank reviews

CoBank is nice and exciting when you are new and before you get thrown into the thick of things. Once you are up and running with your orientation you learn just how understaffed every single department is at the work. The company has a shadowing portion for advancement to other departments and literally every group I spoke with is/was understaffed. CoBank runs a lean ship despite boasting record profits and how well they are doing. God forbid associates have some breathing room if it means saving a couple of bucks from hiring a new person or three. CoBank's reluctance to hire more bodies seems to apply only to the common worker doing the majority of the work. When my department's manager was promoted to a different position in the company they were replaced with TWO people, while also bemoaning the lack of funds in the budget to hire extra people to actually help with the heavy workflow. One of the people who replaced this old manager was actually promoted (which is good), but their role was never backfilled meaning the team was actually down more workers as a result. Speaking of being new, the onboarding is terrible. The general company overview is comprehensive, however individual departments typically have NO formal training and everyone is set up and trained piecemeal. I've been here several years and still have not gotten set up for some logins that others in my job have. After a while you stop asking because what's the point? Over the pandemic managements was able to pivot to WFM. While the CEO acknowledged that they can't walk back on that without losing talent, managements is still clearly trying to get people back into their large and expensive office space. They have been pushing "Connection Days" that no one actually ever seems excited for, but management swears up and down associates are clamoring for. Department managers "strongly encourage" their teams to come in to make the initiative look more successful than it is. Due to individual deals and different standards for different people, CoBank allows some associates to work fully remote, no questions asked, while allowing their co-workers with the same job and responsibilities to be called into office at managements discretion. This is just poor leadership to make deals with other employees you are unwilling or unable to make with everyone, and frankly, sows discourse amongst teams when certain people get special treatment. Managements is slow to make changes. Managers will be in meetings about meetings, and I don't think I have ever seen an initiative launch date that wasn't pushed back several times. A lot of the software is clunky and feels incredibly outdated. It's such a waste of time and resources where leadership could be focusing on their teams and addressing actual issues but instead they need to have a meeting on something mundane. While people are generally nice at the company, there is a toxic culture of different departments playing hot potato with who does what work. Sometimes it feels like sorting out who processes what takes more time and effort than actually doing the work. A great perk of CoBank is the yearly bonus paid out to associates. However, even that is messy. The bank made record profits in 2022, however, the multiplier given on our 2023 bonuses was lower than in years past because of associates not meeting some obscure goal(s). Again, the ASSOCIATES made the bank break a record year and they don't even get rewarded for it. Who are these metrics for and what do they actually accomplish besides giving managements an excuses to stiff workers? This is a genuine question. As the average worker I have no ideal what metric/goals we didn't hit to cause our bonuses to be cut. How do we work towards something we are not aware of?