I am currently employed at JPMorgan Chase, one of the largest financial corporations in the world. I hold the position of Loss Mitigation Specialist and Lead (Assistant Supervisor) of the financial processing division. This division in the corporation handles all home loans that are in pre-foreclosure and our goal is to help our customers keep their homes. This saves our company money because we take a significant loss of foreclosed homes, as well as keeps our customers with us because they still have a home to sleep in at night. My department consists of approximately 75 employees. The organizational structure in the Loss Mitigation department is vertical. We have one manager, five supervisors, five leads, and about 65 loss mitigation specialists. Each supervisor is assigned one lead and about twelve specialists. The chain of command is structured the same way, because if any specialist has a problem or concern they usually run in by their lead first. If talking to the lead does not satisfy the problem then the specialist and the lead will speak to the supervisor together. The next step is the manager then the director, but if you want to speak to the director you must have went through the proper chain of command. .
Our manager has an open door policy he encourages all departmental personnel to bring complex or personal issue to him if necessary. The Director, on the other hand is hard to get a hold of, let alone talk to. But for the most part I feel that the lines of communication are effective and used all the time. Our department is a very close group and we truly are like a second family. We have a very low turn over ratio in the department and once someone comes on board with us they stay for years. When we have our "round table" meeting I often here that the reason some employees do not consider changing positions even for more money, is because they don't want to leave the family type atmosphere in our department.