For all the smiling faces, fun personalities, drama-free work and all the positivity that is promoted, the reality is that most of everyone is at the mercy of exacting, emotionally imbalanced clients who often pressure BSC employees to the point of mental insanity. Rather than try and account for or protect employees from this reality, leadership heavily subjects employees to it. If your client can’t be appeased, the situation will be on you despite all your tireless efforts. When I was onboarded, I was told that Businessolver wasn’t a finger-pointing business; they look at process as a whole and improve the process rather than isolate the problem employee. That was an absolute lie - associate-level employees will get burned when something goes wrong, and they’ll get burned even more if they don’t fall on their sword for it. I was told that Businessolver is mistake-tolerant and that employees can use those opportunities to learn. That, too is a total lie. Managers with more leverage and have been around for a while know how to play the happy cultural politics while secretly pointing the finger at a fall-guy. One manager got on a call with two associates and absolutely yelled at them, per their comments to me.
Additionally, the way teams are ran isn’t homogenous - the standards set forth by some leaders are far different from others. So there’s that. This means that expectations and performance standards aren’t always aligned. And with previous frequent team realignments, that can make working with consistency difficult,
In addition, employees are asked to give their “pulse” and encouraged to be totally honest, and advise people that “there are no wrong answers.” That’s patently false. The squeaky wheel doesn’t get oil, but it’s usually summarily executed by employment termination. One day they’re online, the next day, you’ll get a notice in stand-up that so-and-so is no longer working at Businessolver. I’ve seen it happen from people who have frequently pulsed yellow or red.
Workloads have the potential to be absolutely ridiculous for some. This becomes a tyrannical problem when management expects its happy culture to win the day over all its process problems and overwork. Cases, which are account and employee issues, are excessively leveraged to the point where process efficiency or operational innovation is totally ignored. Rather than try to improve process, caseloads can be in the hundreds, sometimes into the few-thousands for clients. KPIs focus on case resolution, which would make sense if cases didn’t have so much variance. In fact, often times these KPIs aren’t properly measured and there are times where cases bounce around between one person to another and go in circles between departments without any real progress. And yet while it would make sense to better improve the process, instead the heat is placed on client service associates and leaders.
At least for the team that I was on, there was a strong push to hold people accountable using metrics, especially for the associate administrators like file analysts and champions. In doing this, the variability which is inherent in service-oriented industries like benefits isn’t properly accounted for. Accountability through metrics and quotas might make sense for an industry like manufacturing where things are predictable. It absolutely doesn’t make sense for benefits, when client needs are so varied and benefits are so highly customized to every client, each with a high difference in needs. Then there are some KPIs that just don’t make sense, such as dashboard statuses. So much attention is placed on these, and yet lots of clients don’t really utilize them. Their utility isn’t streamlined, often requiring a lot of manual work, and can sometimes become a huge time-waster. It’s surprising that no one has ever stopped to map the amount of time it takes to do tasks that don’t actually help the client - or anyone.
Perhaps my favorite thing to slam Businessolver on is an article they published about how organizations that offer paid paternity benefits are seen as more empathetic and helpful to their employees. Yet, how many months of paid paternity leave does Businessolver offer its employees? Zero. The number of PTO days for unsalaried employees? A mere 12 days, which is below the more competitive employers, and lower than what you’d expect for a culture that seems to promote well being. For an organization that wants its culture to be empathetic, many of its senior managers simply don’t know how to really ask the question behind the question with its own employees and the way it does things, or how to authentically empathize.
Combined with grumbling of toxic elements within leadership, a disingenuous management which pretends things are ever so happy when in fact many are secretly miserable, and a strong need to conform to what people perceive as a happy culture, in the end, you have a operationally dysfunctional organization that is masked by the people who play the part of the happy-go-lucky “Solver.” If you don’t play the part, they will get rid of you, or you will quit. Either way, there are many people in this organization that don’t have the good intentions that are reflective of the culture.
