Interesting Place - Claims Representative/Claims Specialist Social Security Administration Employee Review

Workload is astronomical. You will need to work at least 10 hours of OT per week to keep up with workload. You will spend most of your evenings and Saturdays working OT and some Sundays too. Although Social Security touts it's work life balance, the scale def. tips towards working. Most managers have little training with respect to how to manage, so just use your imagination on how that works. Promotions to management and other higher paying positions are often awarded by the volume of work that gets processed. This causes some employees to take "shortcuts" and not properly process work, so while they are promoted, you are left to clean up the mess their "shortcuts" created and left to deal with the angry clients that have to suffer through lost checks, incorrect payments, and the debts that the shortcuts created. Annual bonuses are given, but they usually are equivalent to less than 1% of your pay, so a $300 yearly bonus is about average. Training is terrible. You will be watching videos, alone in a room, and then after watching about 8- 12 weeks of videos your are expected to interview the public non-stop and not make any mistakes. You will have very little assistance. The mentor assigned to you will be expected to keep up with his/her own astronomical workload and at the same time train you. As a result, your training suffers. The mentor usually values keeping up with their own workload over training you because, if they don't keep up, they will loose their job. Employee reviews are so subjective that it is unbelievable. When someone quits, retires or gets fired, a replacement is not hired. If they are replaced, it may be years later. When they are replaced it will take years for the new employee to start performing at a fully competent level. Most times, the new employee quits or is terminated because they cannot keep up with the astronomical workload, feel the training is inadequate, and/or cannot take harassment from management. Systems are very old. Most run on a DOS based system. They are no where near user friendly. It is hard to find instruction manuals and when you can find an instruction manual the directions are poorly written and confusing. You are mostly interpreting law. The legal manuals are confusing and often conflicting. You must then take these confusing and conflicting legal matters and explain them to the general public who have varying degrees of education, may have intellectual disabilities, and may speak little or no English. If you speak another language you will usually be forced to take on a more complex and larger workload with no extra compensation. While new computer systems are being rolled out, they are often worse than the old systems they replaced. Other than talking to your Union Rep, there is not much of a chance to give feedback. Social Security used to have a program to submit suggestions on-line, it has since discontinued this program. Management rarely acts on the Unions' concerns. Due to the above Cons, and the fact that most of the staff is aging baby boomers, there is a high turnaround. Very large brain drain problem. Once you get hired and assigned to an office, you are pretty much stuck there. Don't expect to transfer any time soon. Offices tend to have an unspoken anti-poaching policy, so if a job opens up in an office you want to transfer to, expect that you will not get that job. Since it is hard to obtain hiring authority and because within management promotions and bonuses are often giving to those whose staff processes the most work, managers tend to do whatever they can to keep you in their office, including but not limited to giving terrible references for all employees up for promotion, giving any employees with any chance of getting promoted terrible written reviews. I have seen people who were informed of a transfer or promotion only to have it blocked by their managers. There is a blame the victim and blame the whistle blower culture. If you come to management with a problem, you are just making more work for them. The attitude I most often perceive is that they didn't get promoted to do more work. They saw their predecessors and noticed that they seemed to have cushier jobs with less work, so they aimed to be promoted to those jobs. It's often best to just leave them alone then bother them with problems.