Pros
-Some colleagues are genuinely wonderful people. -95% remote work with the occasional required on-site. -Stipends for therapy and home office supplies.
Cons
-Sales team members were hired on the premise of working exclusively with inbound leads, but lo and behold, once the sales team ballooned in size the inbound well dried up and we instead had to resort to largely poor-quality outbound lead lists. Sales leadership even sent us a survey asking if we preferred to work with outbound leads or source our own referrals. Basically an indirect way of telling us that they had no plan to keep the inbound pipeline sustainable. -The salaries are NOT competitive, despite what recruiters may say. It’s insulting that they claim to be an industry leader when they offer below average wages. -We use some pretty questionable claims to lure in potential therapists. Headway does not actively provide referrals and its own internal network barely does anything for most therapists. However, that doesn’t stop the company from posting job listings that claim therapists will be given “referral resources” for working with us. -Concerns and feedback are minimized or simply waved off. It seems that Headway’s commitment to a culture of absolute positivity means that nothing can go wrong, even if it’s to the detriment of people just trying to do their jobs. -The dehumanization we’re encouraged, even expected to practice is astounding. Therapists and patients alike are human beings with responsibilities, priorities, and shortcomings in their personal lives, but the quotas and expectations we’re held to means we need to treat them as numbers and rush them into using our product. One piece of “advice” we received during our slower holiday season was to remind therapists that people usually need more therapy during the holidays. -The systems we work with are a mess and it’s so clear that crucial teams are painfully understaffed. Urgent messages and requests can sit unanswered for hours and even days. It feels deliberately cruel that our high monthly quotas are hindered by how slow and clunky our backend can be. -Our marketing strategies are equally terrible and sometimes even laughable. Many providers reach out assuming we’re an employment agency or completely misunderstanding what Headway’s product actually offers. -The more questions one asks, the more it feels like our teams actually have very few specialists and instead just fill those roles with people promoted due to seniority. “Please check with your manager” has become the default response. -The CEO says that he wants employees to feel that Headway is the best company they’ve ever worked for, but how exactly is that possible when it’s so blatant that profits and targets reign supreme over actual people? For all its claims about being unique and special, Headway is no different than and just as shortsighted as other start-ups in that it refuses to invest in its actual employees with a longterm plan. Everyone is expendable for the sake of hitting targets. IC teams are revolving doors with extremely poor retention rates. Team members get hired and replaced by the dozen on the regular. -Ironically enough, as a mental health company that works directly with insurance companies, in 2023 Headway downgraded our health insurance benefits and switched to a cheaper insurer. -As another review pointed out on here, they weaponize the “mission.” We’re allegedly working to revolutionize and fix mental health care, but it comes at the cost of employees being made to feel insufficient and disposable. If you’re not thriving in a dysfunctional system, clearly it’s YOUR fault. Headway’s leadership has crafted a narrative for their employees that states that their mission is of utmost importance, but employees’ own priorities and well-being have to take a backseat. It’s truly insulting how much the company feigns concern about how important mental health is, but makes its own employees grind themselves into exhaustion to meet expectations. -You may have seen that Headway has actually replied to some negative reviews on here mentioning high satisfaction employee survey numbers. What they don’t mention is that these surveys are not anonymous, which logically discourages many employees from being too candid with constructive feedback. Same goes for our weekly executive Q&As, where employees not only have to submit their names along with their questions, but they actually have to read the question out loud in front of the entire company. -In what is possibly one of the most disgusting “executive moments” I’ve witnessed at any job, during an executive Q&A an employee asked what Headway’s stance was regarding one of its business partners having made the news due to an alleged toxic work environment that enabled the harassment of mainly women employees within the company. Headway’s CEO (along with another executive) went out of his way to argue that “there’s always two sides to a story” and that he personally met the other company’s CEO, who seemed like a nice guy and even happened to be a father—so clearly there’s no way he could’ve tolerated an abusive environment on his watch!
