Forward reviews

The CEO of this company really threw any potential this company had down the drain. And all the top talent are leaving one by one. The only people left at this company are either: 1. Young, naive, fresh grads, who were sold a dream to change the world and haven’t yet figured out how toxic this place is. 2. People who feed off of the validation of the CEO and “drinks the kool aid.” 3. People who know the toxicity of the workplace and haven’t yet completely lost it enough to quit/haven’t found another job yet. If you are looking at Glassdoor because you are wondering if Forward is someplace you should work, let me tell you my story because I was there once too. Let me also preface this by saying, if you are a health care worker (e.g. doctor, nurse, physician assistant, scribe, etc), DEFINITELY run. They don’t care about you here. You are nothing but a cog in their machine. You don’t get the same benefits and you’re treated like a second class citizen. Some time ago, I was young, eager to make an impact, and had the mindset that I would work as hard as I can for the mission. I went through the interviews and felt so excited with every single person I spoke with…until I had my final interview with the CEO. In my conversation with Adrian, he made so many statements that were blatant red flags (which I will not repeat here because they were THAT bad) that my opinions about Forward were a complete 180 from before I talked to him. After that conversation, I remember scouring Glassdoor to find any comfort or sign that I should still take this job. In the end, I decided to take a chance, despite all the glaring red flags, because I wanted to change the world that badly. Looking back, I should have listened to my intuition. My biggest beef with this company is the CEO because every problem discussed here on Glassdoor directly stems from the culture he created. To list some of the most glaring red flags: 1. Forward is full of “yes men.” If you dare to have a different opinion, you will be publicly attacked/embarrassed by the CEO, let go and no one will be told what happened to you (sus). 2. Forward deliberately exploits the eagerness and hopefulness of fresh young grads. They want people who give their lives to the company, accepts not being paid a fair salary, and accepts a flat structure because “you should care more about the mission than money or title.” Don’t be fooled. 3. They don’t care about patients. When processes are created, the number 1 consideration is efficiency, not risk to patient safety. As you can imagine, this also means they don’t always care about following rules, especially if the “rules” make processes clunky. Imagine if a hospital won’t sterilize equipment because it’s “not efficient!” It’s just a matter of time before something goes wrong! 4. No boundaries between work and life. If you ask about “work life balance” in the interview, you will be cut. They don’t mention that they have Thursday night all hands meetings from 6-7pm WEEKLY until your first day. Then you have no choice but to accept this. The purpose of these meetings is really to rejuvenate your motivation towards serving the mission. They tell a couple sob stories and gaslight you into being OK with slaving away your life for one more week. The CEO also has no issue scheduling meetings on the weekend. 5. If you give your life to the company (this means work from the moment you wake up to the moment you go to bed and never oppose leadership/ the CEO), they will love you. Otherwise, you are at risk of getting let go, plain and simple. 6. Creating a campaign to have current employees write positive ratings on Glassdoor to deliberately boost the ratings is all sorts of messed up. I really didn’t even want to post this review, but after seeing such a vile tactic to manipulate the ratings, I knew I had to. You can really tell how much current employees drink the kool aid just by reading the 5 star reviews (; Negativity aside, my genuine opinion is that the idea of Forward is unlike any company I’ve seen. It really is a “change-the-world” type of company. The execution is what ruined it. The CEO is not there for money, I’ll give you that, but he is there for power, which is objectively worse. If he really was there to help people and change the world, he would not treat his employees he way he does. Leaving this cult was the best decision of my life, and my new mission is to reclaim the joy, happiness and hope that I have lost and live my life to the fullest (as I haven’t been able to before) and help others not fall into the same trap I did.

When I first started here, I was really excited about the company and the job. You are in charge of your own hours, can take as much time off as you need, and the company mission of creating a healthcare system that didn't rely on insurance was one I could get behind! Unfortunately, none of that has made this h***hole worth it. The learning curve for the this job is steep. Training took forever and the training modules are outdated and useless. Everything I learned was from my coworkers. Corporate will not communicate with you. The CEO and his operations team were INCREDIBLY out of touch and elitist. MDs all have different expectations for scribes and your performance is often rated on these expectations. It used to be that your hours were based off of these ratings as well, but they've thankfully gotten rid of that because they are extremely understaffed. Speaking of being understaffed, when trying to tell corporate that we needed more team members after it got to the point of more visits coming in at the same time than scribes being scheduled per shift, we were told that they weren't hiring because they assumed that their current scribe team just didn't want to work. They have attempted to cut off all communication between the scribe team, for no reason other than a chat channel being "too unstructured." They fired scribes for communicating with their coworkers that they would likely quit soon, after already being GROSSLY understaffed. To top it all of, when a scribe asked the operations team what they planned to do after firing 4-5 people in one weekend since all of the scribes were already overworked, the CEO himself messaged that scribe and told them that if they were feeling overworked maybe they should work less. My coworkers were great but at its core this company is the exact opposite of what it claims to be.