The environment in the last few years has been one of relentless cost cutting. Many of their best people have moved on. Surviving employees have no sense of direction and purpose, and feel they are treated as appliances.
Bonuses have been slashed severely and show no sign of improvement even after the recovery.
Management has changed direction repeatedly with no accountability for failure. For example -
1. There was an expensive project to outsource most of Operations. This was abandoned after several years and many employees had to switch jobs from AB to the outsourcing vendor and back again.
2. Similarly, IT employees were relocated to White Plains which was an impossible commute for residents of NJ. The rationale was that the NY office space would be sub-leased to generate rental income,. After a couple of years, this project was also abandoned and the employees were moved back to NY.
3. IT management decided to start a captive offshore arm called AB Solution Center. The rationale here was that by eliminating the consulting middleman, they would be able to hire much higher quality resources who could replace onshore staff. This project also failed - AB did not have the scale to start their own operation, so they reached an understanding with AXA India. Instead of paying more, AXA started subcontracting to the same consulting firms who had been eliminated, but paying even lower rates to preserve their own margin. IT teams spent many months trying to get it to work, but gave up one by one. Of course, this did not save any of the staff who had been marked for elimination.
