"Well, I hope it's a long ceremony, 'cause it's gonna be a short honeymoon" - Spaceballs
Pros
TIAA-CREF has great history, and a noble mission statement which makes it easy to get behind it and believe in the brand. Its a large and stable company that takes many steps to ensure employee's are safe and taken care of. The people are genuine, and despite leadership, keep pushing ahead sacrificing what they can to keep the TIAA-CREF creed alive. Change does occur albeit slowly and if you are part of the push it is satisfying. They need good people at all levels to move this firm in the right direction, and as long as TIAA-CREF stays true to its values its worth the effort. Employees are excessively charitable both with money and time in the community and this promotes a positive corporate culture. Non-contributory savings - ER pays 100% Good health, decent dental, basic vision
Cons
The primary problem facing leadership is figuring out if its a non-profit or a for-profit. Trying to save its declining 403b monopoly by going to 'ludicrous speed' to retain assets, and introducing aggressive selling in a non-profit environment has created a huge agent-principle problem. TIAA's solution to the agent-principle problem is still aggressive micro-management, which doesn't work well with sales people. They cannot offer anything in return by way of a carrot that is consistent. The reason is they are bound as a non-profit to have an ambiguous bonus system which for you is based on variables likely to change from year to year. The bottom line if you are a good sales person, this will not be satisfying as you have no idea what your working toward. Hitting a moving target from year to year makes it hard to find the right productivity combo. In addition, they do not hire aggressively within for the good positions, so expect lateral moves at best. More than likely you will be pigeon holed in the same 'desert combing' job forever unless you push 'Mega Maid' command which may get you ahead or shown the door, its 50/50. There is a huge disconnect with New York and its large client base, except institutional money, so your job most of the time will be explaining why smaller clients should care about TIAA when TIAA doesn't seem to care about them. Which unfortunately was the reason TIAA was created. The operations department is slow and cumbersome with all the bureaucratic and system issues as if created by 'Dark Helmet' providing many Spaceballs moments for clients, which they will tell you about. At the end of the day the people on the front lines who are client facing, are the glue that is keeping this company together. There are good and honest people working here, and make it worth while. If it were not for this loyal and dedicated front line to pick up the pieces and take the heat for the companies lack of direction, well it wouldn't be pretty. If TIAA doesn't change this culture, which I hope it does, once the economy turns around those good employees still left will have their own Spaceballs moment when they look around...