USO reviews about "people"

Salaries and titles are based on company donations. Stopped allowing cash donations from patrons which lowered total overall donations.

New president is a tyrant. Told all HQ team they had to move to DC or force you to resign. Then he hires people from his old company and allows remote. Changes his mind. Disrespectful to employees( curses at them). Not a lot of room for growth with in departments. Org changes direction ever few months.

There is no clear strategy guiding this organization. The problem is not just vision, it’s execution. Basic discipline is gone, and decisions get made, reversed, or quietly abandoned. Work gets redone, priorities don’t hold, and teams spend more time re-interpreting direction than actually delivering. This is a failure at the very top. Since the transition to new executive leadership, direction has become reactive and inconsistent. Decisions are made quickly, with little context and no visible accounting for tradeoffs or downstream impact. When disruption follows, ownership disappears and the consequences roll downhill. Recent mass layoffs have made this situation undeniable: a significant portion of the workforce was cut with no meaningful reprioritization. Everything stayed urgent, and workload didn’t just increase - it became structurally unrealistic. That’s not a bandwidth issue, but poor leadership judgment. The response was to tell remaining staff to “work our a**es off” to maintain output, without raises, performance reviews, or any acknowledgment of what was being asked. The mission makes this worse, not better. Employees are asked to give more because of the mission, while leadership cuts the very programs that drove meaningful development impact and shifts focus toward revenue. That tradeoff isn’t explained, but imposed, and the cost is carried internally. The outcome is predictable: experienced people leave, and institutional knowledge walks out the door. What's left is a culture of fear. People manage up, stay quiet, and hope not to be next. Those who remain burn out trying to stabilize a system that has no stability underneath it. Burnout isn't an exception: it's the model. Communication reflects the same pattern in that it lacks clarity, arrives too late to act on, and is managed for optics over substance.

- new CEO is implementing ideas that benefit him more than anyone else - under our new leadership, the USO is implementing a return to office policy that is setting back the organization years - we're a global organization that needs to be distributed and already figured out how to be successful, so the CEO's strategy makes little sense. - he's actually asking people to relocate from all over the world to D.C. so people can use Teams to talk to each other from within the same office instead of from our homes. cool. he's about as out of touch as the current administration, so maybe it'll all work out. - beyond the CEO, things can be slow to move across the organization. process can get in the way of impact. - back to leadership: how exactly are you ensuring the success of the org for the next 85 years? we are killing support for the field without giving them additional resources. make it make sense.

Leadership alignment, communication transparency, and long-term operational planning have significantly declined in recent years. The organization is currently undergoing a massive workforce reduction and restructuring effort that has often felt reactive, disorganized, and poorly communicated to employees. Experienced staff with years of institutional knowledge were frequently treated as interchangeable despite carrying critical operational continuity, relationships, and field expertise that cannot easily be replaced. Communication surrounding role eliminations, remote work expectations, and staffing changes was often vague or contradictory, creating unnecessary uncertainty and frustration during an already difficult transition period. Career progression also became increasingly inconsistent and influenced by internal politics, shifting leadership priorities, and perception management rather than operational contribution or performance. In my own experience, I spent years on a strong upward trajectory with increasing responsibility and impact (with stellar reviews year over year) until eventually falling under leadership that seemed more focused on control and optics than developing and retaining high-performing employees. There is still meaningful work being done here, but morale, trust in leadership, and operational stability have taken a significant hit.

Regularly lays people off while elevating executive salaries. No raises announced and some departments are forced to return to office but current employees are all out of state so it is just a way to fire more people without paying them out or paying unemployment. Employees are sent a form to check that has two options: Move to Arlington (one of the most expensive cities in the US) or be fired. Does not care about their employees and sometimes show more action for big corporate partners than actual service members.

There has been a lack of leadership for many teams, which has made decisions hard. There has also been a lot of change across the organization this year. The morale and the culture are significantly down, unfortunately.

recent return to work mandate has been a challenge to adjust to.