Unfortunately, the remaining 80% are middling at best or combative, unengaged, or completely out of their depth at worst. The proverb “You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink” rings true with much of the 80%. Health plan administration involves many cross-team dependencies and requires teamwork across the aisle for an organization to be successful, so you can see how this presents a huge problem.
The above applies even at the leadership level, where often the leaders have zero clue what their individual contributors or even managers reporting up to them are doing, no long term goals or attainable vision for their departments, and such a severe lack of domain knowledge that they would not stand out in an in-depth interview for an individual contributor role on the team(s) they’re supposed to be leading in the first place.
Some (but not all) teams face a constant employee churn and large-scale reorganizations happen once or twice a year because things just aren’t working. Sometimes the “problems” in leadership roles are rewarded with just being moved around if they are not let go. Any leadership change happens at a snails pace, even when it’s clear for multiple quarters that the respective departments cannot succeed under them.
There is a total disconnect between product, operations, and engineering, which leads to product having (some) idea of what they’re administering that is totally removed from what’s actually happening, operations struggling with inefficient workflows and asks that either aren’t achievable at all or require layers of workarounds or automation, and engineering failing to drive efficiency across the organization as they lack an even shallow understanding of how health plans are supposed to operate or what the problems are. This all leads to poor quality across the board, and a significant time investment in rework that could be spent on innovating.
Morale is exceptionally bad here because of some of the challenges I’ve described and greatly contributes to the churn.
To briefly touch on company culture, don’t expect to ever do anything onsite, company parties, or any real perks. If you are local to Buffalo they raffle Sabres/Bills tickets, that’s about it.
No 401k match at this time.
No PTO payout on voluntary departure, even for rollover hours from the previous year.
Dissatisfactory annual bonuses due to poor company health.
