Banner Health reviews

New evaluation system discourages managers from recognizing top performers. Directors in various departments have been instructed that they cannot give employees greater than "meets expectations" on annual evaluations. One of the Colorado facilities recently won Healthgrades Top 50 Hospitals award, which ranks it in the top 1% of the country. Yet, the employees who helped accomplish this are apparently not exceeding expectations in any way. And the bonuses have been discontinued. It's all about the profit and everyone is expendable.

The primary con is that that there's a complete disconnect between the hospitals and corporate management. For the most part, I mean that new corporate policies and rules are put in place by desk-dwellers at the corporate office (occasionally in conduction with the handful of higher level, "desk only" administrator-types at the hospitals). The policies or rules are almost universally designed to save money, and almost universally have a negative effect on employees (example: change from performance-based pay raises and bonuses, to a policy of no raises, or a maximum raise of 1% for the top person in each department). While base pay is pretty good, such practices certainly lower overall morale. It's a double-edged sword, though. The nurses and staff dealing every day with patients may be aggravated by such changes, but they still treat patients in exactly the same way. I'm not saying that they shouldn't, but the company acts as if it knows very well that the high moral fiber and ethics or the medical staff will not change, even if the company slowly takes away fringe benefits (lowering vacation days or PTO calculations), eliminates pay raises, and at times, disempowers employees from bringing forth ideas for real change and improvements. Also, as I mentioned earlier, the only way to increase your pay or get a promotion is to work for the company for a long time. They virtually instill this into the minds of each new hire, and you'll find many employees with "certificates" on their walls, stating that they have worked for the company for 5, or 10, or 15, or 20 years. This is highly reminiscent of unions and almost militaristic. The major downfall to this is that when a higher position opens up, the individual who applies and has the most "time in" with the company, is the person who gets the job. This can result in bizarre scenarios where a mid-manager in an area such as food management is promoted to a corporate desk job managing payroll or IT (without the person having any education or experience in that area).