Premera Blue Cross reviews

I’ve worked at this company for over a decade, and unfortunately, it has consistently gotten worse year after year. Opportunities for growth are minimal, and the pay is well below industry standards. Recent actions have been particularly disheartening. Washington State recently increased the minimum salary requirement to $78k per year for exempt employees, and instead of adjusting salaries accordingly, the company reclassified those earning below this threshold as hourly employees. This change strips employees of their up-to-8% bonus, suggesting they can "make it up in overtime." Essentially, we’re expected to work more hours for the same pay—a blatant disregard for employee well-being. What’s worse, this change was communicated just two weeks before Christmas, despite the company knowing about this requirement for over a year. Adding insult to injury, the company highlighted the CFO in a promotional piece, showcasing him in black-tie attire with his family traveling the world—an incredibly tone-deaf message to employees facing stagnant wages and diminished benefits. Speaking of benefits, they’ve worsened again this year, with employees now being required to pay for vision coverage, which was previously included. The company has also chipped away at flexibility. Telecommuters who were required to come in five days a month are now mandated to come in eight days, further reducing work-life balance for those who valued remote work. Overall, the lack of foresight, declining benefits, and disregard for employee morale make it difficult to recommend this company. It’s disappointing to see a once-promising workplace take such a turn.

With the departure of the former CIO in 2019 and the arrival of the current CIO in 2020, the company has gone through a massive layoff and its work culture has become so disorganized and in many cases toxic that it is not destination workplace it once was. IT had high functioning Agile/Scrum teams that had developed over the course of a lot of hard work that started in late 2018. Rather than gain a full understanding of the history of that transformation, the new leadership quickly broke and re-orged those teams into Capability Product Groups that are now trapped someplace between quasi-Agile and Waterfall project management taking the worst of both and the best of neither. The complete disconnect between leadership and the rank and file has resulted in no less than 5 re-orgs that started in December of 2020 just after those lay-offs. At this point, so many people have left due to this poor management that the organization has been decimated with a constant churn that makes accomplishing goals exceedingly difficult and causes additional burnout in employees. Not only does the CIO and his leadership team appear to have little understanding of how their decisions affect the actual dev, engineering and product teams, they seem unable to process input from their middle managers that could lead them to gain that understanding. I would not expect the CEO and other VP's to necessarily understand this situation as their roles can be very different, however the Board of Directors should. This current board seems to have an excellent capacity to be wooed by click PowerPoints detailing arbitrary metrics, flow charts, and graphs and a singular ability to reach new levels of cluelessness. I would expect board members (who bring in hefty salaries themselves) to actually understand how the company works and what they should expect from their IT leadership, however that doesn't appear to be the case. If the proverbial buck stops with them, who holds them accountable and who removes them when they provide no value? I don't know the answer to that last question, but someone should figure it out.