I’m going to tell you why you should not accept a position at State Street, and instead run far, far away. If you are currently unemployed just collect benefits from the state until they run out. If you are a recent college grad look somewhere else for experience, you won’t learn anything here. If you are currently employed at State Street I offer to you my sympathy and I would encourage you to break the chains and to look elsewhere. Finally, if you are already miserable, hate your life and are a glutton for punishment, then this may be the right place for you to work. If you like to be overworked, but underpaid, underappreciated and disrespected, then this is your dream job.
A little background on me - I had been a long time employee of State Street, starting right out of college. I have a tremendous work ethic and I am a fiercely loyal person in both my personal and professional life. I am the type of worker willing to sacrifice my spare time for the benefit of my company or team. I’ll learn my boss’ job and my staffs’ tasks so I can be versatile and help out wherever needed, ensure my team is cross trained so we can be as efficient as possible, start work early, leave late, log in on weekends if necessary, etc. - whatever it takes. I can confidently say I’m the type of employee a company would like to recruit and retain. You know who model employees are and who is not. I’ve been around long enough to work with all types, the ones you wish were never hired and hope they move on and the ones you want to keep forever.
Anyways, I’ve been around to experience State Street’s last three CEOs – David Spina, Ron Logue and Jay Hooley (the good, the bad and the ugly). There were actually plenty of positive reasons to join State Street back in the day. Although the pay is lower than competitors you were given job stability, a good benefits package, 401k match and even a pension, a cooperative and healthy environment to learn about the industry and you could work south of Boston in Quincy! That was the biggest selling point for me – not having to commute into Boston, but the pay was reflective of that. There would be training classes you could attend and regular learning/sharing environments were encouraged. People were relatively happy or at least content working here and it felt like we were all part of one entity with common goals - everyone in the same boat, helping each other and caring about how their job affects each other. There was a true employee culture here when I had first started.
However, over time every reason to be an employee at this company has diminished. The frogs have been boiling for years now and there is no letting up. The pension has been phased out, which I suppose is expected, as most companies do not offer one anymore. The company match on the 401K plan has been reduced. Training classes and sharing environments are few and far between, if they exist at all. The new operating model put into place (Centers of Excellence, Shared Services) extinguishes any industry learning opportunities. New hires are placed into single tasked braindead silos where you do not see how other teams or departments are impacted by your actions, or how they impact yours. You will learn one thing, one aspect. I believe this is being done to dumb down the employee base, and enables them to eventually hire unskilled workers to do the jobs, which are obviously cheaper. (Knowledge about the workflow is disappearing as more and more long-time employees leave for greener pastures because they’ve just had enough of the BS.) The company is no longer known for job stability. Teams have more work than they can chew because of multiple layoffs each year for the past decade, each employee is doing the work of 2 -3 workers. Outsourcing to unskilled workers in India and the Philippines adds to the chaos, as these workers create language barriers and frankly they don’t seem to give a damn about doing quality work, so you’ll have fun cleaning up their errors. All of these frustrations create internal teams are hostile towards each other. We used to be on the same team and work together, but now it’s every man/woman for them self. There is a lot of finger pointing and blame between groups/teams that should be working together, not against one another. Also, they’ve moved a ton of folks into Boston now that they’ve open up the Channel Center. So, now you can get the salary discount of working for State Street AND have to commute into Boston, how nice.
All of these changes are limiting the knowledge base, knowledge sharing, and creating terrible moral for overworked and stressed out employees. By the time I left, I could see the quality of service given to our clients was the lowest I had experienced since joining the company. It was even commented on by our biggest client. The company has lost focus of why it was once great – a flourishing employee culture and great client service. I mean, I can go on and on about dozens of things that are broken internally at State Street. It almost feels as though there is more wrong here than there is right. I can also go into much, much more detail and specifics but this post is already getting too lengthy, so I’m going to finish up.
The company I work at now is like night and day compared to State Street. We actually care a lot about giving out clients the absolute best service. All employees are treated with appreciation and respect. The employees are not stressed to the hilt. I am not working before or after my scheduled hours, or weekends. I actually have flexibility in my schedule. Need to leave early? Ok. Going to work at home? That sounds good. Want to take a day off? Sure. There is no BS so far and I love it. Leaving State Street has been the best move I’ve made in the past 15 years.
To those running the show I would say to go back to the roots that made the company a place people wanted to work. Employees are your most valuable resource. Focus on them and all other issues will take care of themselves, specifically the downhill trajectory of the quality of client service. Also, when I worked there no one knew the purpose of “The Way Ahead”. Stop with these silly slogans, employees don’t care. They’re too busy getting their arses kicked on a daily basis.