1, MetLife is comprised of two groups of people. The first group was hired when MetLife was a mutual company that coddled low performing employees. This group is slow moving and adverse to change. Typically they have little technical skills and instead of helping, hinder productivity as they are incapable of grasping new software or advanced skills beyond data entry. This group routinely is incapable of performing anything beyond their normal routine and does not like to be asked to step outside of that box or learn new skills. A second group of people exists which were likely hired in the public company era. They tend to be more motivated and tech savvy, picking up the slack for the slower group but not being rewarded or recognized for this.
2. Technology - MetLife is slow and plodding. Often, IT projects are too expensive and time consuming to make realistic deadlines or implement improvements or new products/processes. MetLife is effectively held hostage by their weak IT team. Servers are slow, software updates take months; a laggard in the industry.
3. Bloated divisions - far too many employees exist in redundant roles. This limits hiring in areas that actually need employees due to MetLife's fear of downsizing.
4, Tail wags the dog - Met is improving here, but in years past, the sales team made the decisions, not the financial and actuarial analysts. Sales members were treated like gods and the budget was spent to keep them happy at the expense of the employees doing the actual work.
5. Decision making - very, very unclear who owns decisions. In fact, Met has spent a lot of money asking consultants to come in and help them with this. This started the "who has the D" question, but that is still quite unclear. MetLife is highly siloed. Information is not communicated broadly. MetLife's leadership pretends to communicate broadly by sending vague e-mails from several senior leaders, but each e-mail is a simple re-write of the previous e-mail and none give much detail.
6. Face to face interaction - Upper management is rarely in the office, and when they are, tied up in meetings all day, which makes it very unclear what they are truly working on.
7. Too many chiefs, not enough indians - simply put, most people do not want to or are not capable of doing much of the technical work at the company.
