Some of the departments my team works with are revealing some crazy stories due to the layoffs. Major issues are reaching the surface as key employees that were let go last year were not able to transition their years (decades for some) of knowledge in two weeks. Bad decisions were made from a lack of experience, upper management forcing results in unreasonable time frames, process audits are failing, teams are duking it out, and money is being thrown out the window to sweep it under the rug. Conference calls are getting intense, and no one seems to be concerned that clients are the ones being harmed. Everyone is just trying to save their @ss! This is madness. The company is throwing integrity out the window. No integrity towards he employees or clients.
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Oh, how I know all of this! I was with the company for 17 years. I started in claims, adjustments all on UNET, Customer Advocate and then Reporting for over 12 years. As soon as they hired the new woman, cannot remember her name now all I heard about was automation this and that. I told my peer who also been with the company 17 years as well that we better be careful with her. I got serious evil witch vibes from her and her boss who if I remember was from Google. Anyways, I got a project to where I need to automate all our daily, weekly and monthly reports. Which I was the only one of the team who did that project. My project manager told our manager how I needed to get a bravo for all of that. Yep, I got laid off instead with about 100 other different analysts in July. That was my thank you. They love to do their layoffs on Fridays. Our jobs went to the wonderful Ireland who could not do reporting without us fixing them. You know I never got a warning, wrote up, nothing for 17 years. Yes, I was at a higher pay but after 17 years at a company that is not shocking. Yes, I always got Bravos and raises. It was not like I was some bad employee that they got rid of. I even had raises that were 20 percent before. I got blindsided which was my own fault. I go comfortable. I used to never trust the company, but I thought I am willing to give them the rest of my working career. I planned on retiring with from the company, I was very dedicated to them and this is how they repay. Anyways, I got my severance pay and after two months I found another job working for home, doing reporting but making almost 15k more. Never trust them! EVER! NEVER get comfortable to where you think you are okay since you are a good employee!
Beware if you 'exceed' year after year with 5 overall, your salary becomes a target to meet budget cuts. I was the SME and still hearing weekly how lost and dysfunctional the business is without me 2 months later. The core values have been over run by witty wisdom. The first sign was not holding the Culture Ambassador Summit in 2019. Corporate does not care.
It would be fantastic if you show up at the Annual Shareholder Meeting and pose questions to management. That will definitely get their attention. Your opportunity is at the Annual Meeting.
More workers than you even know stopped truly working a decade ago and are still here taking a paycheck buying themselves time. Managers watch TV all day. Workers place “efficiency” as highest priority and make calls early in the morning. Sick Members never answer early. They do this on purpose to get through calls and be done with work. Sick members also don’t want calls because as soon as they say no we reenroll them again next month to offer it to them again. They know we just tell them what to do and we and they know they don’t have money or energy to do it so they decline our assistance. Makes for an easy workday. But those of us that work hard know their time is coming to an end soon. And for those who know they don’t do much I kinda see why they don’t quit and move on. Why should they if the company wants to keep them and leadership doesn’t care and is milking the system as well as leadership several paygrades higher than frontline. Many of us here 7 plus years won’t be here much longer and are looking for other options. But some aren’t moving. They want to stay and relax.
I would take a knowledgeable Temp with critical thinking skills any day over some of the useless people i have experienced in Optum/UHG. Did you know there are jobs eliminated where the employee barely did anything? yeah, a TON of that BS going on for YEARS and making bank. you know who you are on this message board, the ones that can't survive when they're let go because they sat in their closet office for 10 years documenting "unable to reach" for every member on CM caseload. now you cant even work part time doing direct patient care. here come the disability claims (insert eye roll here). you cannot place a value on life lessons, and here's a biggie. i hope you didn't squander all of that salary and planned for a rainy day. cuz its pouring on some of us, thankfully the experience and salary left some of us prepared as we never thought we'd be here forever.
If you get laid off, share nothing.
UHG is no longer interested in retaining talent, they’re cutting long tenured employees due to higher salaries and higher PTO banks.
They don’t want to pay $80k for someone who knows what they’re doing...they’d rather hire new and pay $60k and hope it works out.
Vital signs are worthless as there are manipulation of the facts and and a lack of response or care of the issues.
My team has bombarded those vital signs with paragraphs of issues towards upper management and leadership. What did they say and do?
Response 1: "This team must be unhappy with their direct managers not leadership. They aren't talking about our decision making. Managers need to improve." But my manager scores are high? "Those must have been for upper management and the person must be confused with which is upper management and you. You need to improve these signs."
Response 2: "Why are these scores low?" You didn't approve positions to replace outgoing employees. You expanded their responsibilities to a level where we are beyond a 40 hour work week. You don't support them. "What are you going to do to increase these scores? You need to respond to them with words that will improve moral."
Response 3: "What's wrong with your team?" It is never upper management's fault!
While a small thread, this actually has some good information in it. Information that people are probably...putting into those Vital Signs surveys we do every year, but is getting ignored with the standard "well, there's nothing we can do about that, you can't please everyone" response. Perhaps, there's an opportunity to be had here.
The constant waves of layoffs and intentional misinformation is destroying employee morale, communication and ultimately hurting the customer. When I personally first heard about these layoffs back in October, my source told me there would be a wave in Oct, Nov and March. Since then, there's been a layoff in each month in between as well. It's clear when they tell us they don't know what's coming, that it's simply not true.
What's the most painful thing to see is that while people are being laid off, the company is hiring thousands of people. What UHG needs to do is make a FAR BETTER effort to retain these employees.. Put in a system where.. if an employee is being let go.. they can have the option to move to a dept that's hiring instead. If they don't want to.. that's their choice.. But, I'd bet folks would be a LOT happier if the company at least attempted to retain them. Simply telling people to apply via the website is NOT that answer because that entire process is broken and we all know it. You can be 100% qualified and still get rejected immediately by the system.
Temps are the new SMEs.
I have witnessed over the last year and a half the most insane decisions made. Eliminating entire subject matter experts with no one left who knows anything. Just when I thought things could not get any more stupid...surprise the last two weeks have left me shaking my head again. In my head I hear that frozen song...it finally makes more sense to me, brillant.
Happening a lot on my projects as well. Communication is almost non-existent, we're always way behind schedule and people are getting short-tempered. This is what happens when you're already short handed and you make more and more and more cuts (or hang cuts over the employees heads that are still there). It's creating a lot of stress and tension, and the language barriers are further hurting things. I don't see consumer costs going down as a result of this as they're claiming. It's hurting the consumers, not helping them.
Yes that is the result of only looking at cutting costs in terms of dollars/stack rank. Many great people were the backbone of their areas and were higher paid. You cut them and the work and performance suffers. Uhg seems perfectly fine trading cost for quality. We will see the effects for quite awhile.