Quickly Losing Credibility as a "Destination Employer"
Pros
PenFed has great benefits, compensation, and supports military families well. Small team and unit environments are great as well.
Cons
Although the benefits and compensation are notably good, the past year has shown a steep decline in employee morale. This is primarily due to how drastic changes in the company were handled by upper management (VPs, Executives). There is a significant lack of communication between upper management and lower level employees, including managers and below. I cannot speak to what it's like working in a branch, but the majority of those I've spoken with in both the Eugene and Omaha service centers feel this way as well, and based on prior reviews it seems branches share our sentiments. To give more of an outline of why so many people are choosing to leave (like myself, after 18 months in a supervisory role), I will explain the changes causing such frustration. Over the past year or so, PenFed has been involved in multiple mergers to grow the company's membership. Two of these mergers have been upwards of 24,000 new members, which they were not staffed to handle in the least. This caused queues of nearly 80 (sometimes higher) people all day, every day, for weeks at a time. The most recent merger with Valor Federal Credit Union happened just prior to my leaving, and on my last few days there was a 20-minute wait time just to speak with a representative. Obviously, this put huge stress on MSRs and caused a lot more work off the phones. Requests piled up for supervisors, huge amounts of angry members demanded to speak with them (each supervisor in my unit took approximately five supervisor calls per day), and other departments were crowded with questions even they couldn't answer due to lack of communication and an insane workload...credit cards being nearly a month behind. Because of these gigantic bumps in membership, staffing quickly became an issue. Therefore, the plan currently is to create more MSR positions - demoting supervisors, both senior and eventually operations officer levels, and hiring loads more new representatives. I completely see the reasoning behind this and why it looks good on paper: it would allow for excelling representatives to move up certain tiers with different capability (lending authority, override authority, etc.). The problem is...who will train all these people? MSR is an entry-level position. Most people coming into this role will not gain the experience or shadowing opportunities they need to really get to the next level. The transition to higher levels in operations used to be from MSR to Senior MSR to Operations Officer and so on. Each position allowed the person below to learn the skills necessary to promote. This will be much, much more difficult now, as the managers are already overworked and underpaid and cannot take on more training. Watching what used to be a strong destination employer turn into something where almost everyone I spoke to each day was, in their own words, “miserable,” was hard. It got to the point where as soon as someone would experience an issue or severe lack in communication, they would state the phrase "that's PenFed for ya" because it became a commonality. It took me over a year to officially make this decision, but the lack of respect, communication, and acknowledgement by our current upper management is what ultimately led me to quit.
