AG was ill prepared to take on the acquisition of Ladenburg. Understandably, the pandemic was a complicating factor. But over a year after the merger/acquisition, many employees were working from home, often with equipment they purchased themselves or already owned, without reimbursement or even a uniform policy to address the investments an employee needed to make to do their job. While working from home was a welcome opportunity (they previously did not trust employees to do that unless you’d been in a remote contract agreement, or your manager would make an exception from time to time), in 2020 and through 2021, call volumes and workloads were higher than ever. During that same period, post merger, there was uncertainty about future compensation structure, compensation “leveling” was supposed to occur (and was either never done or never communicated about), and the added stress of seeing quite a few people “downsized”, while seeing other departments remain understaffed and drowning. Yet, during that same period, the organization spent quite a bit of money on new executive-level hires. For all of the “streamlining” in other areas, the top heavy structure created a clunky communication and decision-making structure, an inability to be nimble, and quite a bit of disconnect between the executive-level corporate talking points, the frontline experience of their employees, and the feedback those employees were getting from financial professionals. That’s a recipe for a drain on morale. Compensation is fairly low for the industry, with disproportionately high expectations and sophistication expected relative to what they’re willing to pay employees. This is short-sighted from a corporate standpoint because turnover is expensive and a drag on productivity.
