Pros
Benefits package, holiday schedule and PTO is good, not the best but good. Branches are clean and well cared for which made for a nice working environment. A lot of the employees are very nice and welcoming. The majority of staff want to help but then there are those that don't and only care to place blame and tattle. Free employee checking and savings accounts. The members were and are awesome people!
Cons
Everything within the credit union is micro-managed. Branch Managers can't even schedule their own staff without approval from the VP of branches. Very cheap institution. For example, the branch asked for file folders and we were sent 5. We asked for batteries and received 2. That is how cheap and micro managed Sound is. Regardless of what Sound says, they are not pay commensurate with other credit unions. Job descriptions for Tellers, Lead Tellers and Member Consultants are with out a doubt paid $3-$6 less per hour than other well known credit unions. Until recently, Sound did not publish pay scales on their careers page. Compare Sound to Twinstar, WSECU, and ACU and you will clearly see the difference. As stated in a previous review you're either a part of the "it crowd" or not. If not, upward mobility and appreciation are hard to come by. It is apparent that the EVP and VP of branches runs the show and if you are not in their favor, you will not succeed, no matter what you try to accomplish. High turnover. Sound knows they have a problem recruiting and retaining good people. However, they aren't making a good effort to do much about it other than put on a good show. HR and upper management aren't trying to get to the root of the problem. They think they are but they aren't. Putting pictures and quotes from staff on their careers page is just fluff. Don't let it fool you. They seem to promote based on who they like and not who has experience and can coach others to success. One Branch Manager in particular had limited management experience and made several errors that if a teller had made the same mistakes would have been at a minimum written up or even fired. For example, nearly $3000 was left in an unlocked cash drawer for 2 days in another tellers cash drawer; she had been working in the other tellers cash drawer while they were gone. Nothing was ever done and she of course threw away the audit evidence. Same manager deposited a large sum of money into another members account and made light of the situation. This wasn't even an account where it was "in the family" rather it was a completely separate member. Same manager has a new teller with zero experience writing her monthly branch summary because she can't formulate her own thoughts. This clearly demonstrates that Sound doesn't choose managers based on experience but rather who they like. I had a few opportunities to suggest things and express my opinions to HR and while at first it seemed they cared in the end they didn't. The initial training is good, however, all branches are not on the same page with policy and procedures so it makes for a haphazard working environment. Often times things are done inaccurately because the tellers are told different things. It creates chaos. When a front line employee doesn't know something they are told to refer to the "Operations Manual" but the manual is missing a lot of information, hard to apply to real life transactions, and doesn't always apply to the situation at hand.
