USAA Reviews

Pros

8% 401k match, Starbucks, co-workers are great

Cons

Micro-management, monotony, sales pressure, no advancement opportunities, product push, ridiculous measurements

Advice to Senior Management

Allow employees more autonomy

Pros

The benefits are good, especially the 401K match, and the company is financially strong. If you are in the right area it can be a good place to work.

Cons

In some areas (not all) management are very dishonest and self-serving. I have never seen such a lack of honesty and integrity in any organization as what I saw in some areas of USAA. Ironic since they talk so much about integrity. Don't expect anyone to stand up for doing the right thing. Even if people know about things that are not right, they keep quiet if it does not impact them directly.

Advice to Senior Management

Needs much more direct and honest feedback from employees to top management. The board and the CEO does not have a clue about some of the things that are going on in the company and I am sure they would be very upset if they understood how much money are wasted to promote the agendas of some managers/executives.

Pros

* 8% 401k match
* Medical, Dental and Vision
* $5k Tuition reimbursement
* Easy workload for the average-acheiver

Cons

* Call center
* 5 Weeks notification for vacation
* You are given a 1 week window to schedule all of your days off for the next YEAR at the end of the current year
* Back to back phone calls
* No deviation from their call structure
* Advancement depends on your sales ability - 30-40% of sales is what is needed for advancement
* Sales drives your calls
* Stressful if you are not good at up-selling
* Kindergarten-like atmosphere where everyone is a winner; if not, they'll make up a metric to present to you
* Micromanagement on every level; deviation from your (2) 20 minute breaks and (1) 35 minute lunch results in an opportunity to be passed up for a promotion
* Performance metrics are very subjective to the management when deciding promotability
* Payscale is on the lower end of the paybands when coming to the company, if you are a mid-level or senior-level, expect to be compensated at the lowest end of your band with "room to grow" - See performance metrics bulletin above
* Non-commission job, so there is no reward for up-selling, unless you want to get promoted - See performance metrics bulletin above
* Military style compound with security guards manning each gate
* Very passive-aggressive coworkers who will do anything to stomp out other employees vying for a promotion
* Very conservative atmosphere where everything you say or do must be politically correct
* Call center attire need not apply; you must wear business casual unless 97% of the company donates to a corporate directed charity, then it is

Advice to Senior Management

Year-over-year record profits should not be a priority. For such a conservative company, slow growth should be the business objective - look at companies such as Washington Mutual, Lehman Brothers, Enron, General Motors, and Ford. Big companies who "would never go bankrupt" did just that. Give your guys some time between calls, say, 30 seconds to 3 minutes. It would do a lot to their morale and maybe sales and performance will increase naturally.

Pros

Great benefits but not much else to say.

Cons

Not a financial adviser role.
Comical referrals based upon "life events".

Advice to Senior Management

Market the role to those who should fill it. There isn't much use to hire outside advisers to fill the FSA role. This role should be developed internally as it truly isn't a financial adviser role.

Pros

Member before I was an employee, I still strongly believe in the mission - USAA is hands-down the best financial security company in the world, and seriously goes out of their way for the members
8% 401k match, approximately 5k in tuition money
Almost all of the happiness with the job comes purely from the overall mission, but it can be difficult to focus on serving the members when over-worked, stressed, and not recognized (more below)

Cons

Referrals/sales. These have become the most important stat for any employee. They are weighed the heaviest in all performance evaluation (in two of the major categories - call quality and business results) It seems to me that the most important factor in evaluating a customer service representative should be the member's rating of their service. If the member rates you a 5 (or 10 as it now is) and yet you failed to convince them to buy a new product, you're rated lower.
Performance evaluation is very gray and very subjective. Managers have these areas in which they comment on your performance/results, Below expectations, Partially met, met, exceeds, and far exceeds. An outside observer might expect this sounds an awful lot like a bell curve. This is most definitely not the case. Instead it's more like 75% ME, 20% PM, and 5% BE/EE.
USAA's internal hire/transfer climate is so competitive, If you want to go any other department or move up in the company, everyone knows you need that EE rating. Managers will dangle it like a carrot but always find some reason not to reward you.
They have endless stats analyzing the most minute of details about your activities and performance on the phone – do well in one area and they can just dig deeper and question you on why you didn’t magically do work list while we had back-to-back calls all day every day, or why some random number that you didn’t even know existed is out of line with peer average. They can even “live observe” you (they sit at their computer and watch everything you do on your computer and hear everything you say, doing this all day until they can call you out on something). If you really dig on someone, you can find something wrong with anyone. An employee can open Facebook on break and if someone on their page cussed, they can get fired for inappropriate usage of the computer. If someone calls in and asks for insurance cards to be faxed to the DMV you can get in trouble for not saying a ridiculous “setup” such as “In order to ensure I’m understanding your financial situation I’ll be asking you some questions through out the call.. so what has you calling in needing insurance cards today?”
I wish I had concrete numbers, but personal observation of turnover would be roughly 50% within first year or two, and 90% within 5 years. Yet somehow they claim <5%. My guess would be that to avoid reporting it, they don’t count anyone on any form of corrective action (which, like I stated earlier, a manager can find something wrong with anyone, and if an employee is already feeling overworked and stressed the added stress of possibly losing your job can make someone leave in a hurry to avoid having to say they were fired)
I don't think it's because the executives are greedy and money-hungry. Maybe I am still naïve, but I bet General Robles really does believe the things he is saying during the employee meetings. I believe they only want valid referrals, not a referral on every call as we’re expected, I’d expect they don’t really want us over-worked as we are, but despite hiring like crazy the last two years, we lost so many of those new employees and they’re hiring less and less, I’m guessing with the catastrophes that hit recently they don’t want to spend anymore, so they’re instead looking to be more totalitarian with our jobs(if you go to break 15 minutes later than scheduled your manager/director are e-mailed). But something is being missed as it transfers down the chain of command.
With the climate being so competitive, representatives are all working themselves to exhaustion trying to get every detail well above “peer average” in the futile attempt to get “EE” to move up (thereby driving up averages in every category), managers want to get promoted and make a name for themselves, so they demand more and more of their representatives (nitpicking every minute detail to demand more and more of those that want to succeed at USAA, forcing out those that can’t keep up). I don’t believe the corporate climate has shifted to greed, I just think it’s a result of all the competition and everyone trying to look better than their peers.
The end result of all of this is stressed, over-worked employees, and USAA is losing all of the good ones to other companies, the service-oriented employees are leaving because they’re tired of the sales-oriented measurements, and members are suffering with poorly trained reps because the skilled and experienced ones are leaving within 5 years. Members need to be aware that employees can’t say or do anything about all of this, we don’t have a confidential HR that we can just ask questions to for advice, managers do these evaluations/corrective actions and employees don’t know anything about how the processes work or what their rights are and have no one to complain to. We’re told to take it up the chain of command - why would we cast ourselves in further bad light by talking to our manager/director about how we’re upset?

Advice to Senior Management

Return to the original "three legged stool" concept - members, employees, financial strength
Provide more appropriate positive recognition for the front-line employees working diligently for the membership - taking back to back calls all day every day (it is absolutely exhausting)
Provide appropriate performance evaluations - BE/PM/ME/EE/FE should be clearly explained as to what needs to be done to obtain, and should be assigned based on a more statistically relevant manner (i.e. 10% BE, 20% PM, 40% ME, 20% EE, 10% FE)
Quit pushing more and more work on employees as the company grows by literally millions but the number of employees remains stagnant. Stop expecting productivity to magically increase higher and higher instead of just getting more people on the phones to help with call volume. Employees literally don't even have time to take a sip of water between calls. The next call is in before you can close your previous window.
I still believe in the mission, and I trust that executive management does as well, but something is being lost in the mix - the employees.

Pros

Ability to learn and rotate through different organizations (IT, Training, Operations, Banking, Investments, Insurance, HR, Marketing), tuition reimbursement, you will make more at USAA than at any other financial services company.

Cons

Strategic goals change too often, missalignment between senior management's goals and frontline management's execution.

Pros

Benefits and being able to appreciate out military members

Cons

under staffed micro management and all sales

Advice to Senior Management

Get call volume under control and quit trying to grow the company so fast at the risk of losing our employees and membership. Also quit pushing the sales so hard,

Pros

By far the best facility I have ever worked at. Especially for people athletically inclined. Benefits and 401k are outstanding, probably one of the best.

Cons

In technical roles employees performance is driven by manger's perception. The downside is that USAA IT is a matrix organization where technically skilled employees are evaluated based off their perception and not their technical skill.

Advice to Senior Management

Create a concise hierarchy such that technically skilled employees dont have to compete against non-technical employees. Level the perception base and elevate the skill base during assessments. When assessing technical people, look for concrete results based on refinement in process and skills. When assessing non-technical, then play the perception game.

Pros

Great benefits
Pride in serving the military community
Some smart and dedicated individuals working there
Nice amenities onsite. Several cafes, jogging trails, gyms, relaxation rooms, gaming rooms, sports
Pretty good testing and user acceptance processes

Cons

Extremely conservative culture (not political, just uptight)
Strict dress code unless you give to charity
They outsource the coding to India and, with the exception of some frontend customer-facing development, are not highly interested in the quality of work. Throw more hardware at it if it doesn't perform well.
If you are at a lower level you can expect to participate in development to an extent but once you move up your job becomes more like a project manager's and you are mainly keeping tabs on contractors from India and their offshore counterparts
Meetings, meetings, meetings. For some reason, you cannot get anything done at USAA without setting up a meeting. Everybody from senior level on upward has at least 60% of their day blocked off for meetings. Managers usually have days solidly blocked off. Email often goes unresponded.
Outdated technical stack. Don't work here if you like working with cutting edge stuff. Only exceptions are mobile app development and web scripting (HTML5/CSS3).
Nobody does n-tier development here, it is all segmented out at each layer, i.e. the web devs are agnostic of how anything works on the backend and vice-versa. They picked Wicket in favor of many better, industry-standard options just to keep this practice in place. In general they discard industry standards in favor of some bizarre homegrown solution (read: your experience does not transfer out of here).
Extremely tangled dependency web. In some attempt to eliminate duplication of effort they have intermingled scores of web services together such that a minor change to one requires checking a mountain of dependencies and the testing that goes with it. It's not uncommon for what should be a simple web service to call 5 others and take a really long time to complete.

Advice to Senior Management

Let's try getting the job done in the USA. I think USAA's target market would not be thrilled knowing how much we rely on outsourcing their service to other countries.
Change the meeting culture. Expect people to respond to emails and actually work at their desks instead of walking all over the building all day to attend meetings. Most of these meetings are not even useful or necessary.
Pay attention to the industry and try to copy what works instead of just coming up with your own way that doesn't really work.

Pros

Benefits are very good.
The mission statement is taken seriously and customers, while not always getting the best price, are also not taken for a ride.
Member facing employees are given the authority to do the right thing for the members.
Our military oriented customers are incredibly loyal.
San Antonio has a "smaller" town feel and overall USAA won't work you to death.
Salary to cost of living (especially housing) ratio can be very attractive.

Cons

Lack of formal professional / career development in mid management ranks.
Customer loyalty also serves to nurture a status quo culture.
Many great people experience career failure for challenging the status quo or for making someone in power "feel bad". This is a conflict averse organization (unless conflict is passive aggressive).
Too much emphasis on external hires (yes, once you are here you are staff, not the next shiny object).

Advice to Senior Management

Try a little harder to distinguish between people who get you results and people who can talk about results.