Pros
Nationwide seems to be a very stable company that is in no danger of drastic cutbacks in employment or shutting down as an enterprise. Job security, if you are competent, is decent even in the current recession. Nationwide, as a whole, is also competitive with benefits packages (medical, dental, etc) and relatively generous with vacation time and flexible time off. No protests are likely to be made if you need time off for family, medical, or just relaxation reasons.
Cons
The organization at Nationwide is a bureaucratic mess with constant duplication of effort, stagnation of progress, obstructive upper management, and general empire-building by business units. The effect of this on the floor employee is a paralyzed environment that - even when it can recognize an issue - fails to react in a timely or appropriate manner. All too frequently, it is blatantly obvious to the actual workers what needs to be done for the good of the company and customers, but there are so many other business units with conflicting selfish goals that one must actively fight your own company to even get the most minor change accomplished. Even more frustrating is when the very units and individuals in conflict admit that they aren't doing the right thing because it would shrink their empire or cost their own virtual budget. A major contributing factor to this environment is a fascination with number crunching: Nationwide is utterly fixated on measuring and counting everything that possibly can be assigned a value. Everything, no matter how nebulous, has to be given a number and quantified even when not appropriate. This fixation on measurement makes it easy to create reports and databases, however, what is often missed is the time spent managing this data is often counter-productive to actual results or conflicts with results. For instance, in my own position, we actually must use four different time-tracking applications and are penalized if we do not fill them all out correctly. These applications, Lotus Notes Calendar, Clarity Project Management, IEX TotalView, and an internal application called TOPS (Time Off Planning Service), of course do not communicate with each other in any way. Every day one must spend a great deal of time looking in each application for discrepancies between them and filling out each one as appropriate. I can only imagine the number of man-hours wasted across the enterprise in this tedious exercise. Finally, related to the fascination with metrics, Nationwide has fallen into the trap of too much bureaucratic paperwork that does not seem to serve a purpose. Like many other companies, policies are often implemented at Nationwide by upper management as an "edict from on high" without a good grasp of the usefulness of the process. Some examples: 1. If an existing employee leaves the group, a new request must be filled out as if hiring a totally new employee position with its associated justifications. The idea is to try to use passive attrition to reduce headcount: "If you don't need them when gone, don't rehire!" However, the real effect of this is that when an employee leaves and absolutely must be replaced because they are vital, there are needless delays because the entire new position creation process must be followed. How does management work around this? They often hire contractors to fill the gap at much higher costs for the company. 2. In my own technical support department, a process was implemented that required technicians to get a supervisor's approval before an emergency (such as a major system outage) was declared. This seems a reasonable standard at first glance, however, it was not necessary for years beforehand and employees were empowered enough to make these judgment calls. After the change, it was found that reacting to an emergency and notifying the affected groups went from taking approximately 5-10 minutes to 15-30+ minutes as supervisors had to be located, appraised of the situation, have the severity explained to them (they often didn't grasp the technical aspects of the outage or its impact), and then go through the usual outage notification procedures. It was widely recognized this was counterproductive to crisis handling, but it still took over a year to simply go back to what we had been doing. 3. Monthly reviews of technician performance in my department included a "signing statement" that this review had taken place. This was, simply, a statement on a piece of paper that you had had the review that required a signature by both parties. At one point, the question arose as to why these documents were required: A little investigation found that no one actually ever reviewed these documents and they had all been shoved into a filing cabinet for the previous five or more years. In fact, it was found that many could not be located and had probably been thrown away. When it was noted that we should stop requiring these as we had never referenced them and had trouble even finding them, this request was adamantly refused by management. And so, we continue to sign a review document that immediately disappears into the ethereal recycle bins. In short, most of the employees I know have actually given up attempting to make any changes within the company and look outside for new employment opportunities.
