Pros
Great retirement and wellness benefits.
Cons
Comprised of ex-military/ex-government upper management, Navy Federal is resistant to change, bureaucratic, and micromanaged. The company relies largely on archaic, fragile, and unintuitive systems. The fact that we still use Lotus Notes for email and calendar management speaks volumes alone. Business units and departments are very siloed with communication barriers and no collaboration. In particular, employees below manager level (at least in my department) are forbidden from emailing senior leaders/managers without permission from our senior management. Getting promoted or moving to other internal positions is a matter of who you know and how well you know them. Working remotely/from home is “frowned upon” across the organization, even though we have the means to do so, because they “want to see us working.” This largely comes from CEO Cutler Dawson’s personal vendetta against working from home. Coming from another organization that freely allowed working from home, especially in the D.C. metro area with its horrible traffic and severe winter weather, this has been a major setback for me. Management, at least in Marketing and Communications, frequently gives contradictory, bizarre, and even threatening feedback. You could be told that you are exceeding expectations one day and on thin ice the next. Managers have the ability to appoint non-management team members to weigh in on individual performance reviews, a system that can be seriously abused with affects to our compensation and bonuses. CEO Cutler Dawson puts up a pleasant and jovial front, but he is also known to outright fire employees who contest any of the issues discussed in this review.
