BCAA Reviews

Pros

People are really supportive and happy, Team leaders, managers. co workers have a nice collaboration to work with. Nice pantry area for food

Cons

Not at all bad environment

Pros

Decent benefits Free parking In-building cafeteria "Top Employer", and the company won't forget a chance to make it known

Cons

-Meals in the cafeteria aside from basic sandwiches and wraps are known to give people food poisoning, avoid if possible -Severely below market salaries -Supremely hierarchical, anyone below the executive club does not matter -No regard for personal or career development -Very top down organization where feedback, suggestions, complaints, people are not valued As a general rule, people are amicable at BCAA.... Generally a nice group of people to work with. You'll be hard-pressed to find swaths of aggressive, confrontational people as your colleagues. That said, that also comes with cons as I'll later share. Management: It can vary a bit from manager to manager but a lot of the issues are systemic, and apply to most any team you will end up in. Managers are for the most part, powerless. As a result, they spend a lot of time managing down, but not up. Yet at the same time, they are wholly disconnected from the trials and tribulations of the teams they do manage. Micromanaging can occur at times when the higher-ups are breathing down your manager's neck, no matter how silly and contrived the ask is. The general message sent is almost always, in short: "I hear you, but deal with it". Managers are expected to report to higher-ups/executives, who then make decisions top down, in a prescriptive manner. All this is done with no input from the people and teams these decisions impact. No input from anyone who spends 8 hours a day and 5 days a week living with the results of these decisions. You're simply handed a commandment from up above, and have to deal with it with no recourse. Teams are never consulted or asked for input on their problems, the managers are supposed to be the only representative of the team, except each manager manages multiple teams and is not in tune with what the issues truly are. In short, changes are made, upper management pats themselves on the back and declares problems solved, without asking or understanding what said problems are. Executive team: Part of this is covered by the management section but unfortunately the executives at BCAA are such gems that a separate section must be warranted. In short, executives at BCAA are truly and utterly tone deaf, with a huge ego to boot. BCAA is a very traditionally hierarchical organization, and as a result, the higher up someone is, the more sure you can be to witness blatant power trips and massive displays of ego. I'm talking people who will openly tell someone to shut up, or pull you into a private room to berate you after a meeting if you dare ask a question that does not fit whatever flavour of koolaid they're trying to sell that week. BCAA has gone through a couple organizational changes in recent years, including executive changes. Each and everytime, the reason is "change", but change never happens. In fact, after a change to the C level executive teams report to, most do not know who the new exec heading their department is, and never know because said executive can't be bothered to set foot anywhere below their floor and greet mere peons. In any rare meetings with these executives, the meeting is always prescriptive. "We're making change A, B, and C, and we're no longer doing this and that." Why and what problems does that solve? You're not important enough to know that information, but they'll happily give you the standard "the executive team decided this" or "we worked through this with the steering committee", which once again, consists of nobody who actually knows anything about the work happening on the ground level. They'll happily answer your question with typical PR speak, beginning with "I understand..." from whichever people management book they most recently read. But any question that actually matters will never be answered/addressed, and they never actually understand. Ignorance, cluelessness, and general apathy is a key tenet and more rampant the higher up you go in the organization. Anyone below your pay grade is just there to take your orders and do your bidding, customer experience be damned. No input, ideas, or suggestions from anyone below C level is paid any mind or considered, but if someone who gets paid enough says "it'd be cool if...", you can bet your life that all the headless chickens below them from directors to managers, to the peons will make sure it's realized ASAP no matter how stupid the idea is, or even if it's harmful for the business. Apparently the most recent genius idea has been to place a working Evo car that costs north of ~$20k in the head office lobby to depreciate instead of having it out on the streets generating revenue and serving our customers. Compensation: This is a topic that has repeatedly come up in many employee satisfaction surveys, in town halls with upper management, but never addressed. The top areas of discontentment amongst BCAA employees has always been in the following areas: Compensation (by a big margin), support from management, and empowerment/enablement to drive change. There have been major company-wide meetings where an executive will show the results of the survey and completely ignore the one item that stands out most: compensation. Low compensation is a very real reality for practically all normal employees at BCAA and is the subject of a constant, grumbling undertone within the organization. Yet after many years and losing valuable employees and candidates to other companies, no change has ever been made. In fact, some key persons in the organization have, on more than one occasion, proudly touted that BCAA as a general rule pays 70~80% of whatever the market rate for a position is. Yes, you read that right, there are higher-ups proud of the fact BCAA pays 20~30% less than the market. In fact, if you press the issue, they will let you know once again, that's what BCAA pays, and if you don't like it, leave. Many employees have been sold compensation packages that were not honoured. That might be a bonus that you'll never get, it might be the recruiter telling you there's work from home when it's explicitly disallowed. It might be a raise after X months that will never happen. Effectively, plenty of people have joined as a result of the HR department at BCAA selling them on compensation details that never happened. These are not isolated incidents, they are by and large the norm. Small embellishments, big lies, how bad it is depends on your luck. If you bring it to their attention the response will be "we'll look into it" then "no", no matter how many times you go at it. For a company that prides itself on its brand, trust, and reputation, this is quite an awful practice. Hiring: Not much to say on this front, but a few key things to be aware of. Once you've signed on and are part of BCAA, you're effectively looked at as an interchangeable cog in a big, slow, and poorly-oiled machine. Whatever job description or tasks you were sold on and told you were going to do, may and will change at a moment's notice, with no input from you whatsoever. Doesn't matter if you're an engineer and you signed on with the mutual understanding that you are looking to further develop your skills and experience on X, you'll be told to sweep the floors if that's what management feels they want you to do (bit of an exaggeration but in practice, not too far off from how extreme the change can be) Career Growth: Employees are not treated as the multi-faceted, skilled people with varying ideas and experiences that they are. As a result, your personal skill set and growth is never considered. In fact, there are town halls where everyone will be told, straight up, that employees should be grateful for having a job and take whatever the company throws at them. If you're assigned to work with tools that will not help you become more proficient at your existing skills or keep you employable, you're expected to just suck it up and do it. No one is seen as skilled and talented labour that has options beyond BCAA, and that is reflected and reinforced constantly through the company, executives, and management. General Morale: You'll notice a lot of happy-go-lucky people at BCAA, or ones that don't seem to be bothered by much of anything. The reason is because most seasoned employees are well aware that making noise and drawing attention to yourself does not drive any sort of change, it just blows back on you. Everyone sits around miserable, whining about the below-market pay, whining about their manager and executives, yet no one will dare speak up. If you're familiar with the "Five Monkeys" thought experiment, you have a perfectly accurate window into BCAA as an organization. Don't be mistaken, plenty of watercooler talks happen, private talks behind closed doors, but the general response is simply resigning to acceptance of the status quo. The age demographic at BCAA falls on the higher side, much like government workplaces, because many of the older employees are on the old pension system, which encourages them to stay till retirement and get paid in perpetuity thereafter. As a result, most people go in to collect a pay cheque and await retirement while not rocking the boat as to risk their family's future. And you can be sure management knows this by the way they treat all their workers as interchangeable cogs with a cost attached. For the most part, most current employees will not leave because they either don't want to give up a nice pension they're about to sign off with, or they genuinely believe the skill decay they experienced while working at BCAA makes them incapable of finding a job elsewhere. It's a very depressing and sad scene, and heartbreaking to witness. Company potential/growth: BCAA as a whole experiences very little growth as the company operates and focuses on its existing legacy. Decision makers are largely comprised of C level executives with marketing background, and the top dogs in marketing. The belief system is that BCAA is insurance, despite all the other business units and ventures, and the mission of the company is quite literally to sell more insurance to more people, which is seen exclusively as a marketing problem. This is further evidenced by the density of the marketing area as opposed to every other business unit in the company -- marketing takes up significantly more sqft-age per person vs everywhere else in the company, save for the executives. The few times that the company has to pay out more insurance than usual due to poor weather and such, a very heavy mood runs through the company and people become generally unhappy/mad. BCAA constantly prides itself on its past and the accolades it collects, and will routinely put major emphasis and events on being named a "Top Employer". You will never see BCAA more up in arms and concerned on anything other than being named a "Top Employer". Any other feedback and comments are largely disregarded as they point to the fact that they're a top employer. The company itself is stagnant, dated, and losing mindshare amongst the younger crowd. There is constant talk about change but change does not happen due to the company culture and hierarchical nature of the organization. Give it 30 years until everyone still on the old pension program hits retirement and BCAA might have a chance at making a real change. Until then, it's on track to continue down this hole into irrelevance, if it can survive that long on its existing brand/business. Summary: From a day to day standpoint, the peers you'll meet at BCAA are some of the least toxic people you can find. Generally polite and non-confrontational, you'll have few issues with peers. However, if you're looking for competitive pay, a company that cares about your career or your opinion, an executive team with a clue, or an HR department that doesn't blatantly lie to you, steer clear.

Advice to Management

Truly listen to your employees, don't just placate them until they resign to sitting around waiting for retirement and not speaking up because it's never well received. Actually take steps to fix engagement survey concerns and not just punish people for submitting valid feedback until they feel the need to pretend everything is great. Upper-management in general needs a massive overhaul, there are serious... issues going on and people are either complicit, or embarrassingly clueless. The ship may be sinking slowly, but it is sinking and will continue to until the people that matter stop treating the company like a bad joke with more money than brains.