USAAs upper leadership has significantly worsened over the past 5 years, to where most individual contributors feels like cogs in the machine. Most first line managers are great, but they have very limited autonomy to change the overall culture degradation. I ended up leaving after almost a decade at the company, because I couldn’t see a growth path under leaders I respected. I am very sad for what was once a great place to work. Here are some corporate decisions made with little or no notice to employees, that led me to conclude more negative decisions would follow: * Closing the company daycare: employees found out from the teachers at a Monday morning drop off. This was so deeply hurtful that the company reversed course just a month later, after layers of stress on its working parents. Ironically, the daycare closure news occurred during International Women’s Day week celebrations. * Forcing return to office, after previously asking all employees to work with their managers to select and approve the best work arrangement for them. One year later, AFTER people had redesigned their lives and bought houses to accommodate their arrangement, everyone was told to come back 3 days a week. * Eliminating the pension plan with no alternative. This hurt many of our employees who had chosen USAA for this specific benefit, and was essentially a pay cut without recompense. * Changing the bonus structure so that “meets expectations” receives a multiplier of 0.9 to 1.0, averaging 0.95. If you do your job as asked, you won’t get 100% of your bonus. * Reducing shift differential pay without enabling workers to change shifts. Some people only worked evenings because it was “worth it”. Again, essentially a pay cut in place without recompense. *Eliminating the internal employee chatter website, which allowed employees to upvote concerns. It was replaced with a scaled back version where upvoting was removed. This significantly decreased people voicing concerns. Our CEO literally said in an annual employee meeting that we are “over indexed on employee benefits” and need to reduce them to be in line with market. That was the beginning of a slow bleed of benefits, key differentiators that USAA used to pride itself upon.
