Thread regarding Nationwide (Insurance and Financial Services) layoffs

I hate to say this but this is 100% true. I was at the company for 13 years. Worked my way up to a Director and then started getting lower ratings (despite great work). I then was re-organized and refused to get assigned any work. I’ve never been more miserable in my life.

Eventually when the mass layoffs occurred I was laid off. It was done horribly. The company told groups of people the number of people who would be let go and evaluations would take place over next month. Imagine the culture after that. I actually found a new job and then to my surprise received a horrible rating from my prior boss. So lay off and bad rating without any justification. I never had any conversation with my boss about poor performance and repeatedly asking for work. He kept asking me how my job search was going and you could tell wanted me gone.
This used to be a great company with good folks. I’ve heard the NF side is much better and many of my colleagues left P&C which I completely understand why.

Lastly I’ll say this company is behind the times on multiple fronts, slow to react to the market and too heavily invested in dying distribution channels. No one legitimately wants to improve anything that doesn’t benefit them directly and the company is super siloed. Overall I think it’s doomed as our industry continues to change.

Absolutely true

This is exactly what happened to me (and a few others in my organization) a few years back. I didn't feel comfortable applying for other internal jobs because of the terrible rating I received. It should be noted that until that time I always received very high numbers, raises, and positive feedback until about 6 months before my termination.

Your detailed account of performance evaluations is uncannily similar to what I witnessed. It's a very office-political organization, where subjectivity rules the roost.

One of the more insidious aspects of Nationwide's leadership culture is using employees' fear of impending job loss to get teammates to point fingers and throw each other under the bus. Their continued practice of "lifeboat rankings"* encourages associates to not perform their best, but instead politic their way from the lowest rung... by focusing on managing perceptions instead of performance. One need not outrun the bear, but outrun (or worse, trip) the person perceived as slowest.

(*why would a healthy company even use that concept? "Lifeboat" invokes nothing but dire situations, and the notion there's too many people to fit suggests a lack of visionary leadership and staff planning.)

I was at NW for 5-6 years and have only been gone a year... I know that this has been going on and it think many of us knew... I know for a fact that there wasn’t a single person I came in contact with over the years that wasn’t afraid of losing their job, which speaks volumes.

They’ll also treat you terribly so you’ll quit vs paying you unemployment. I got 3-4 promotions in a little over a year and actually ended up getting “4s” on my reviews (which I worked hard for and seemed impossible), then after moving to another department they dropped me to 3, and then 2... but I was doing good work and then my work just started getting taken away. With a 2, you can’t move anywhere else in NW... so they pigeon hole you into this spot and make life a living hell.

These are just some of the many ways they fire people or get them to quit, don’t replace them, and continue to weigh down their workforce.

It’s sad really... I’ve seen a lot of hard working people passionate about the work they do become subject to the NW way of acquiring, assimilating, eliminating, etc... and the cycle just keeps going.