TIAA Employee Reviews about "senior management"

Pros

TIAA is a very good company to work for. It seems to have a very structured and communicated review process and the promoted company culture is something that is extremely hard to locate in the Financial Services sector. -Many programs and focus to promote ethical and inclusive environment from top to bottom. -Benefits are second to none in Financial Services. (or any other sector) -Upper Management genuinely cares about, promotes, funds and enforces ethical behavior. -Very secure environment. PII and all other forms of data are extremely secure and monitored by a world class, well-funded and customer-focused goal of securing the networks, data, and all forms of access from both internal users that do not require the access and external sources that try to obtain that data. -Lots of opportunity for employees to learn about all areas both within and outside of their core competencies and change their career while staying inside the same company. -Tons of great employees that want to help each other and the company to succeed while keeping the customer first. -Work/Life balance is very good in many areas. (Not all, but most)

Cons

As with many larger organizations (17k+ employees/contract workers and many departments and subsidiaries), TIAA has some groups that are entrenched in legacy management style and require a fresh approach. -Security can sometimes be detrimental to getting things done in an expeditious manner. (To be fair, it is more important to secure the environment than to push things through that may compromise the security of the data to internal staff) -Payroll is incapable of handling any type of large changes and outsources almost everything, including fielding of mistakes, to their third party provider. Would recommend a full replacement of Payroll from top-down and ask some of the contract workers that have multi-company experience for their input. There's more recurring mistakes due to incompetent senior and middle Payroll management and overworked base level staff. I've worked in companies 10 times the size of TIAA that had 10% of the mistakes per employee as TIAA Payroll, and that is being generous. -Human resources is overwhelmed sometimes, especially when there are larger influxes of new staff due to acquisitions. -Some of lower and middle management seem to be resistant to changing the way that they operate and have become complacent in their responsibilities to their staff. -Like many larger organizations, TIAA is slow to implement new technology initiatives. This is not due to the security of the initiatives, it is because many of the teams are protecting the way that they have traditionally followed somewhat antiquated processes. A more expeditious process should be developed and implemented to take things from idea to implementation that doesn't take 6-18 months. Also, consolidation of toolsets that are not redundant and costly would help. IT seems to implement tools/applications and leave the tools that were supposed to be replaced for years after they should be decommissioned. -Work/Life balance is an issue in some specific roles within certain areas, including some IT and Payroll positions.