Slow moving, inept bureaucracy with no vision - Anonymous employee TIAA Employee Review

Being a large and diversified financial services company, a certain amount of bureaucracy and inertia are bound to exist. However, this company takes it to an entirely new level and to the point where it is starting to cause some serious damage. The multiple layers of poorly trained and incompetent middle managers not only create a stifling and frustrating culture but an inordinate amount of inefficiency – a recipe for disaster given the number of headwinds and changing trends enveloping the financial services industry. There is no clear sense of what the company stands for: certainly not for their clients, where any proactive service and communications face daunting impediments from lack of basic resources and marginally empowered compliance minions; or for the employees, given the dreary and threadbare mainly suburban office environments (counter to industry trends of establishing and maintaining locations in urban and downtown areas) and well below industry compensation levels and benefits particularly for those in the asset management areas. More worrisome, senior management has no consistent or coherent plan on how to grow the company, despite the empty inspirational messages they regularly rain down on the masses. What seems to be the top priority is keeping operating costs firm wide as low as possible, not only in aforementioned employee training and retention, compensation (excluding of course the top officers), and office space, but critically, for IT, both internal and external. While competitors heavily invest in their client and employee based IT systems, TIAA continues to operate on shockingly inferior and out dated technology across all facets of the firm. They have underinvested in technology for so long, there is the sense internally they are falling further and further behind their peers particularly since Vanguard and Fidelity continue to forge ahead. Areas that have been identified as growth businesses, including institutional and private asset management, are starved for resources and led by former bank bureaucrats who have no investment management experience or knowledge. Bottom line is that this is not a fun place to work; is frustratingly slow and inefficient, and is under attack from better managed companies with a defined culture and well articulated growth plan.