Micromanagement is rampant however, it's not consistently applied. Let's face it, if I knew the company managed all areas the same way, it would be a lot easier to accept micromanagement as the corporate culture. Sadly, many areas allow front-line employees and low level managers to have an appropriate amount of authority to go with their responsibilities. Even so, it seems like an entire department can have directors making their own rules about how things should be managed to the point where the director's instructions completely contradict the instructions passed down from above them. This results in a lot of inconsistency and resentment by front-line employees and front-line managers toward their director, middle management as well as upper management.
HR is not in charge of policies that should be overseen by HR. They take on the role of an "advisor" regarding too many issues. This results in the inconsistent interpretation/application of guidelines that HR creates but doesn't hold the company accountable for overall. An example of this is the creation of SMART goals and objectives. HR preaches this approach for performance management. However, in all the years I worked there, I never saw a set of SMART goals. Mid-level management either doesn't have the time or intellectual capacity to create them. Or, they simply don't care. My thoughts are the reason behind this is a mixture of both. I've seen directors use this to their advantage to reward people who were (by USAA's core values and corporate culture standards) bigoted, racist, sexist, profane, and in many other ways unprofessional. Yet, others who were truly working hard to honor their commitment to the membership, be targeted for retaliation (even though HR guidelines forbid retaliation).
Performance is managed using "labels". For example, you can "Far Exceed Expectations", "Exceed Expectations", "Meet Expectations", "Partially Meet Expectations" or receive a rating that is "Below Expectations". I understand someone's need to label performance to a degree. However, if you can't (or are unwilling) to create and use SMART goals to measure performance at year-end, then you find that all HR wants to do is to group employees into rating categories that fit a bell curve regardless of how your team actually performed. Lastly on this topic, regardless of your year-end rating, you can be a person who "Far Exceeded" expectations, but due to the salary band and quartile system, you will find yourself receiving less of a merit increase over someone who "Met Expectations" simply because your current salary is higher than the ME performer's salary. To me, this seems like more of an operating cost containment strategy than a true performance management system so stop calling it a "Merit Increase".
The company is growing so fast and hiring externally at high level positions, to the point where they are hurting the corporate culture. Specifically, I saw too many instances where new external hires were coming in from other companies and taking what they perceive as a best practice and implementing it. Sometimes these are good changes, too many times the changes simply emulate what another competitor does and dilutes the things that make USAA unique. Over time, this will turn USAA into just another run of the mill financial services company.
