All you have to do is skim the posts here, or on any other forum, or look at Pulse feedback, or listen to conversations around you when you’re in the office, and you know: things are terrible. Wayne and his yes men and women are driving this bus straight off the cliff. Why doesn’t the Board step in? Are Wayne and the EC keeping the truth from them? Is there a way to get the real facts in front of them?
10 replies (most recent on top)
Some don't even live in the US.Do your homework
The board has to know what is going on, especially with the employee morale. If Carl Liebert (former COO) can be removed as a CEO after only 9 months, then Wayne can be removed after his 3 miserable years at the helm.
It's a race to the bottom, everyone trying to match Wayne's ruthlessness and contempt for the "little people."
Does anyone know what management really does? I'm not trying to be mean-spirited, but when I complained to my manager, he spoke out of both sides of his mouth. One side was for "public" show and the other was what he told me in private.
Also, they seem to be frightened of their own shadow now. It's as if they are afraid of offending the wrong party, and so have no firm convictions of their own. Since they are not sure of who is the right party, they seem to move in whatever direction has the most "wind" ( and, yes, I intended that double meaning ... tee hee).
To me, it's deteriorated into a free-for-all.
The Board is on vacation in Hamptons because they don’t care about you.
At this point, I feel like there are only a few possibilities:
- The BoD is truly disconnected from what’s happening in the company. Most Board positions (from my understanding) aren’t full time, so they may genuinely not realize how bad things really are because USAA isn’t their only focus.
- The Board has directed Wayne and his directs to make these decisions and Wayne is secretly the good guy and is just doing what he’s told (the least likely scenario).
- The Board knows and is okay with what’s happening for some unknown reason.
- The Board knows and isn’t happy about what’s happening, but they are allowing Wayne to finish up his contract and be the fall guy for housekeeping that needs to be done.
All of these are bad. I just can’t think of another possible scenario.
Employee morale is something that sometimes has to take a hit when a company is in dire straits. I think if we’re honest with ourselves we know this to be true, even though it sucks for us. Sometimes hard decisions have to be made in the short term to keep a company afloat (layoffs, benefit cuts, things like that), but a company can’t survive if employees are consistently unhappy for a long time.
USAA has been bloated for a while so some housekeeping needed to be done. It stated to get bloated not long after Bob Davis left. We have/had uncompetitive products and services like our old mutual funds and brokerage services, so it made sense to eliminate those areas. We simply couldn’t compete with the likes of Fidelity, Vanguard, or Schwab. I encourage you to read about the “hedgehog concept” of business management for an idea of what the company may be focusing on.
But what’s happening now is an over correction. USAA has laid off hundreds or thousands of people who lived and breathed the mission. Those people could have easily been reassigned to other areas rather than let go but Wayne and his cronies chose the myopic approach to get rid of them entirely. These people were USAA’s culture. It’s ironic that Wayne talks about retaining company culture but let go so many of the people who brought the mission to life. Instead we bring in people with no military affinity who are completely changing the company culture.
I worry that even after Wayne is gone, the ripple effects from his poor leadership will be felt for years to come. The executives he’s brought in will remain and continue to chip away at the remaining culture.
I just hope we get a new CEO like Jim Syring who can reinvigorate what it means to be a USAA employee. It’s not an exaggeration to say that USAA was a truly exceptional place to work and be a member of just a few years ago (pre-2015 ish). You could feel it in the air. I’m holding out hope that the company can be restored to its rightful place as one or the country’s best employers, but I hope that’s not in vain.
The company continues to have a noble mission. We are in the unfortunate position, though, where our products and services are lackluster; our leadership is focusing solely on short-term break fixes instead of long-term plans to make the company great; employees have been beaten down to the point of apathy. Members see it. Employees see it. I just hope the board sees it and has a plan to remedy the situation before it’s too late. Maybe it already is.
The board knows what WP is doing, and it’s precisely what he and the board agreed to do. Everything that is happening now was planned a long time ago:
- Taking away our EJS voice and then coincidently laying off people who spoke out on the Post, Pulse, Slack, and anyone else who dared speak up.
- Laying off several thousand employees (it began in earnest last year)
- Drive people to all quit (RTO, toxic culture, management)
- Setting up whatever employees that remain to be fired (with cause) as a result of the insane metrics. The metrics are arbitrary (WP even said as much), so they’ll keep whoever they want to retain in their headcount.
- Eliminate/cut benefits
- Offshoring far too much work (our jobs) in one place while also transferring high-risk work to other companies to save money
The above tactics (not exhaustive) were already part of a bigger plan devised last year in partnership with their expensive consultants, which charge more in one week for a few people than most of us make in a year.
The board and WP knew how many people they planned to eliminate one way or another last year. It’s just happening at the individual contributor level.
So long answer, of course, the board knows how bad it was going to get. If they didn’t, would they have allowed him to double his salary (and give hefty raises to other senior EMG) while still knowing they had their first loss in history?
Until WP eliminates whatever large number of employees (and dollars they equal) that he and the board agreed to purge, this will continue.
Short of a miracle, I can’t see the plan changing. I cannot imagine the press will be bad enough for USAA from 300-400 layoffs every other month since they control the news (advertising) so well.
We could hope another government agency (EEOC) comes in for something genuinely egregious that HR didn’t cover up…. But don’t count on it. That’s why they paid the consultants so much money to develop the plan. You won’t find anything about saving money by getting rid of the higher-paid tenured employees (ageism) or people with JARs (ADA) who are more expensive, or just people who have a WFH exception that WP doesn’t want to keep.
The money for the raises has to come from somewhere.
Unless you have a good severance on deck not sure why anyone would continue working here.
I wonder if this is now too far gone to fix? That was my mistake, thinking it was just one more PI and things would be back on track.
My mistake!
Yes! We need to do a ‘No Confidence’ letter.