Staffing - Almost every department at the company seems to be understaffed or underfunded. The review process is horrible and most managers don't even know how to do them. Many people get blindsided with random tasks so much they don't even know what their job is supposed to be. If that weren't issue enough Benefitfocus seems to have decided they don't fire enough people annually so they've been laying people off the the last month or so in an attempt to reach EBITDA by end of year (cause the board isn't happy about the stock price). There's no communication to the employees, they are handing out severance packages that are contingent on those people staying mum and the rumor mill is going nutz. I've got friends at other local tech companies saying they're getting hit up like crazy from people trying to jump ship and I'm not surprised.
Leadership - Since Benefitfocus doesn't have technical career paths the only way to reward people for doing a good job was to promote people into management positions. We now have Directors and VPs who haven't worked in their respective fields outside of Benefitfocus and there is no adequate training or mentoring program within the company to help these people succeed. Benefitfocus has brought in a lot of new senior leadership with experience however they aren't digging deep enough to get the right answers. They are relying on that same under qualified middle and upper management group to provide them information and it's showing in their decision making.
Manual processes - It's kind of ridiculous but for a billion dollar company almost everything that gets done here is manual. What blows my mind is that every person in the company I've ever talked to complains about our manual processes but no one is willing to dedicate their resources to fixing them. I simply don't understand it at all.
Tribal knowledge - Don't expect to see anything documented here. In fact you should just hope that the person who setup whatever it is you're trying to use or work with still works at Benefitfocus. That is of course assuming you can figure out who it was that set it up which is also tribal knowledge and not documented anywhere.
Culture - So the culture of today really isn't terrible, in fact it's still better than a lot of other places you could go work at so it's probably a Pro for some people. I'm listing it as a Con as this use to be the number 1 benefit to working at Benefitfocus. This use to be a work hard play hard kinda place and now they've cut back on the playing but haven't cut back on the working expectations. Anyone whose been at the company since before it went public can see the change and there's nothing indicating that it' going to get better. For anyone whose new it might not matter but for all of those who have been there a while it's a real morale killer.
Communication - For how much management talks about the importance of communication I can only assume that they don't actually know what that word means. They've got 5 teams working on the same problem, people buying tools because they didn't know we already had one on another project and non functional change control. Directors and managers are so far removed from what their employees do and how they do it that they can never accurately account for time tables and consistently over commit to projects forcing teams to take shortcuts to meet overly ambitious timelines. Project requirements often don't exist and goals or objectives are vague at best.
Career Development - Career Development at Benefitfocus is more about "who are you friends with" than anything else. Most positions get filled before they are ever posted so there's no selection or review process and no explanation of the selections are needed. We have annual reviews but as I said most managers don't seem to know how they work and they don't align with most peoples jobs. There's also little to no feedback provided to the individual on what they should work on to improve. Goals aren't really a thing and management makes little effort on helping people advance their careers.
Offshore - I'm not a fan of offshoring work that can be done locally but I understand the business desire for doing so. The problem Benefitfocus has is that they aren't ready to utilize offshore resources effectively. There is not enough documentation, processes are not standardized or defined, the local managers aren't properly trained or qualified to manage and work with them and they aren't as selective in hiring as we are stateside. Benefitfocus simply isn't a mature enough company to be able to properly utilize the volume of offshore resources that we have.
Greedy - I was amazed when Benefitfocus went public how few people actually got rewarded. I had only been at the company for about 2 years so I didn't expect to really benefit from it but I know people who had been with the company for 5-10 years who worked 60-80hr weeks through the "dark days" and didn't see a dime. I mean it's just crazy to me that a company valued at over a billion cares so little about the people who got it there.
