The summary of what I'm about to detail more below is RUN - this is not a safe or good place to work. I've had different types of jobs in the decades I've been a working individual. I've worked retail, grocery, clerical, temp agency, artist assistant, and even warehouse jobs. I have NEVER seen or experienced such a toxic abusive work environment as here, and never seen such negligence by HR (though in my other jobs I never needed to reach out to HR since I had decent bosses). I had no idea that managers could be so horrible and abusive towards employees, but I sure learned my lesson at Prisma Health.
I experienced or witnessed the following:
-The violation of federal law in employees opening mail of hospital depts because they were nosy, completely unauthorized, with no accountability. The particular time I witnessed this directly the patient info they opened was pediatric patient information.
-The violation of employee and patient medical record privacy (hipaa violation?) with one mgr in particular who would share detailed medical information of patients, and employees who were patients. In that particular dept there is NO reason to share other people's medical information details because direct patient care was never part of the job, but the manager was a notorious gossip.
-Blatant gender discrimination in more than one dept.
-During the outbreak of 2020 and beyond, Prisma had tons of strict rules for safety and health as handed down by the government. I regularly witnessed bad employees with bad managers completely violate these rules, not wearing masks, getting within other employees' personal space, and so on, no matter how much it was reported or how often the offender was requested to follow the guidelines. It was crazy.
-Routine, repeated, chronic bullying and retaliation behavior by team members and management - being nasty to certain employees, work sabotage, isolation, refusing help to targeted employees, yelling outbursts, silent treatment, constant lying about targeted employees, intimidation, harassment, repeat boundary violations, violation of personal space, embarrassing/humiliating targeted employees, refusing targeted employees necessary information to do their jobs, managers actively creating animosity between employees, management playing favorites, and even filing false police reports against the target in one case I witnessed.
-The HR dept is absolutely fantastic at defending, excusing, and justifying these reported bad behaviors (and more), most especially when the offenders are management. I know all of the above mentioned offenses as well as others were reported over a time period of about 2 years (to multiple HR people and upper management), and there was zero help from HR for that person. They have lots of HR people throughout the system, and some of them will do a great job at pretending to care, but in my experience and the experiences I witnessed, HR actually DOES little more than enable and support bad actors. Managers protect managers too.
-Prisma has MANY policies in place that do many things including to protect against bullying, retaliation, workplace violence behaviors, gender discrimination, violation of patient privacy, and so much more. But HR, based on what I saw or directly experienced, was not interested in actually enforcing the policies, most especially against management. The only time I was aware of HR using a policy against anyone was when they used a policy to support a manager who violated many other policies against the subordinate who routinely reported the violations. So basically at the end of the day, it's a culture of punishing victims, punishing those who report violations, and supporting managers no matter how bad they are. Why bother having policies at all at that point? I mean, yikes.
-I spoke directly with several employees who had managers act or speak very out of line but the employees were too scared to report anything because they saw the retaliation against those who did report, up to and including termination. I've also spoken directly with people whose approach to working at Prisma depts with toxic cultures was to just put their head down and stay out of the firing line because they feared retaliation for standing up for themselves in any way.
-I had the opportunity to interact with and work with several different hospital departments, and if a dept had a truly good manager then the people were routinely happy and content in their jobs. But that was honestly rare and those were usually the well-paid departments that weren't emergency depts or OR style departments. Most people I interacted with on a daily basis were extremely unhappy with Prisma, management, the lack of fair raises across all depts yet the constant increase in responsibilities. The fact that the executives earn a massive amount of money every year (seriously, look up the public info) yet don't hesitate to skip raises in several departments or cheap out on employees regularly is just gross. Prisma also does its best to keep any terminated employees from getting unemployment which I've actually not heard of from other large companies I worked at. I've heard that across the hospital system they actually terminate a significant amount of people, so that's probably why they try to get unemployment denied for people, but maybe they could figure out what's wrong with the system if they're terminating that many people? Just a thought? On the other end, in my time there they lost SO many good workers, some to better systems and some leaving the medical field completely because they were so fed up. While I know there is a lot of turnover in healthcare, there were times where you couldn't keep up with how many people were leaving just our facility alone. Like many large companies, Prisma doesn't understand that if you treat employees well, truly appreciate employees, and pay them accordingly then you'll retain more good people and save money from the costs of hiring and training and offering certain hiring bonuses to new people.
-There's also the common culture in many departments where the hardest working people get punished by having more and more work piled on them so the lazy people can be more lazy. That's not how you keep good workers, that's exactly how you run them off.
-The culture of Prisma outside of retaliation and bullying, is absolute greed from the top down. Every decision they make to change processes or use different materials was always surrounding making more money. Keeping in mind Prisma is a non-profit. While some of this is absolutely understood and necessary in business, the place they cheaped out on the most was the employees. This greed is completely understood by everyone, it's all money money money, and a common topic of discussion was how employees were routinely getting shafted or had extra work due to how cheap the company is, like when they don't want to pay to be properly staffed and grossly overwork current employees. The support groups in particular are VERY underpaid for the amount of responsibility heaped on their shoulders.
Then there are the times when employees are "appreciated" like Hospital Week or the different appreciation weeks for different departments through the year. Before merging and becoming Prisma the hospital system had different holiday bonuses or plentiful holiday spreads of food to celebrate employees and great "hospital weeks" and such, but the company has eliminated the bonuses and completely cheaped out on any spreads of food including during Hospital Week. During the separate appreciation weeks for different departments the managers are supposed to do things for their people. But if you have a greedy manager then they will give you such little appreciation in comparison to the departments that truly appreciate their team members. It's obvious, it's unfair to many departments, and the company is cool with it because it saves them money. If the manager gets a yearly bonus based on how much money they saved then they're completely enticed to be cheap with their employees, and if they're already greedy by nature then the employees are left even more unappreciated and upset about it. I know of one manager that never celebrated people in any way whatsoever until they were leaving their job - no joke, the team members got lunch in their honor when they left their jobs but never any other appreciation while they stayed in these overworked positions. Other departments would post the month's birthdays and maybe they'd do different little team member celebrations with treats, whether provided by management or by coworkers and that was so nice.
-Even one of my Prisma physicians expressed significant disgust and frustration at how Prisma has stopped certain programs like certain discounted or low-income procedures. This doctor got me the number to St Francis where I was helped with this particular procedure immediately and for no cost due to my low income at the time. Just saying.
Plenty of companies have some bad managers, but if that company will actually DO something about violation reports and bad behavior from bad managers, then that's fantastic and employees are supported. This is not the case at Prisma. I don't know why it is their approach, but their approach is definitely to protect and defend bad managers. So don't kid yourself - if you have an issue with your manager at Prisma, expect that nothing will be done to help you and rather it'll run you off really fast. And when there's so much retaliation, that means that you can't feel safe about reporting things to HR either, because in many cases HR will take the reports straight back to your manager and retaliation is usually on the menu if the manager is a bad one to begin with. In other words, employee safety, especially at the lower end of the hierarchy, is preached about across Prisma, but in what I've experienced and what I've witnessed, is absolutely not a priority at all. That's pretty scary.
