Fortunately, I am working on a project for which the budget has not been cut yet.
However, I wonder how many significant project cuts have happened at USAA lately?
7 replies (most recent on top)
IT development budget in ERC has been severely cut for net year.
The cost savings to cut the many EMG layers (anything above Director) would be tremendous. 1 AVP or VP or SVP is equivalent to how many employees' salaries and benefits??? It's truly a lack of fiduciary responsibility to the USAA Members to be so dense with layers of bureaucracy that costs so much money to maintain. It's outrageous!! USAA is now having hiring freezes in many departments/teams. Some teams have been so thinned out by attrition and no backfills that the team's morale is in the drain and the team members and their immediate manager/director are struggling, while they kept the many layers of executive/EMG layers intact. The many USAA employees should be screaming and demanding a stop to the existing USAA fat structure. But unfortunately, even if you did scream through the Pulse feedback, you will never be heard because the people who are responsible for the Pulse or whatever employee feedback tool are the very layer of executive bureaucratic fat themselves. They're NOT going to vote themselves off the island. They'll vote to toss you out first to save themselves.
I can tell you from USAA experience that the layers above Director are mostly useless fat. Most are hyper bureaucratic and political layers who do nothing but attend meetings all day, demand reports, are people ushers, demand actions from their underlings and enforce that thick layer of bureaucracy to protect their jobs. The worker bees, managers, and directors are given no autonomy and have to respond to the EMG bureaucratic demands and cave into their pet needs. In a modern company today, there is no need for so many layers. Most modern 21st century companies have flattened their organizations into fewer layers, e.g. employee worker bee > manager > director > VP > SVP/C-level > CEO. They have very few layers and in these companies, every managerial position requires the individual to be a functional "working manager" instead of a bureaucrat who doesn't have functional knowledge but prop themselves up as people managers/bureaucrats. Unfortunately, if USAA were to embark on a major organizational transformation overhaul, at this time, more employees would be laid off as so many were hired to service these bureaucratic layers and their demands. However, you could also take the view that it's better to streamline and painfully cut/reshape the organization now so that there are way fewer layers of management, and the long term is a better modern company that can actually compete and be innovative which you actually be could successful in. You can see these results in real life, e.g. USAA is not an innovative company. It is not known to be the first in anything innovative that is truly amazing that has transformed its industry. Its P&C product prices are often not competitive against other carriers. USAA mostly competes on a hyped-up persona to the military.
Just a thought, just remove multiple layers of executives. Many EMG are holding on to dear life for ‘sunk cost’ projects knowing that if the projects get stopped, they most likely lose their jobs?
Real org chart, see an issue?
CEO
EVP
SVP
VP
AVP2
AVP1 (yes, this true. In USAA, there are two levels of AVP with different compensation structures not known to most)
ED
Director
Manager
Employee (where Work gets done)
Some departments are doing prioritization. Some are not at all. In those that aren't, they're behaving like nothing is going on where no projects are reprioritized and the fatty layers are still intact. The direction to reprioritize and cut back isn't uniformed across the company.
All I hear are empty words about "stopping projects that don't make sense" and a renewed focus on prioritization. BS. I'm not convinced that the company can recover.
Many USAA projects are now sunk costs and these large projects are hyper political. It's no longer if the projects have inherent strategic value but that they have to be completed at all costs. Many of these large projects were decisioned by people whose jobs would be at stake if they are cut. And if the project succeeded, they would be promoted. Hence these projects won't be cut because if they were, many EMG, etc would be canned.