Genesis Healthcare reviews

job security as company expands and buys out other rehab providers easy to transfer locations within company

I used to work for Genesis in one of their corporate offices. I was originally a Sun Healthcare employee and was very happy to be retained when Genesis acquired Sun in December of 2012. Almost immediately I began to wonder if the thousands of employees let go were actually better off than having been retained. Where Sun was a personable company where communication and resulting action was practiced and expected I found Genesis to be a slow ponderous bureaucracy that was big on planning, discussion, scheduling and conferences but almost pathologically incapable of executing in a timely way. Communication from Kennet Square to Sun locations was almost non-existent. If you called Kennett Square for assistance no-one knew anything and could rarely (not always) refer you to someone who could help. During the joining of the two companies we had no-one to go to for advice or direction and if we ever did get a call back it was so many days after the initial inquiry that we had just muddled through doing what we thought was best. On the rare occasion when you received an email response, again days after inquiring, it was most often a request (by email) for more information.I came to believe that communication within the traditional Genesis world was equally crippled. It appeared that all the top people spoke to each other, all the middle managers and directors talked together, and all the grunts talked with each other. But there was poor vertical communication so that projects were handed off to subordinates who usually didn’t have enough information or detail to effectively execute their tasks. The fear of blame being assigned seemed to be the sole motivator for middle and lower level employees working. As far as the acquisition of Sun goes I believe now that there was little or no planning. Certainly none was communicated. Perhaps all the executives discussed what they wanted to do and how they expected to merge the two companies. I was not a manager but a quasi-technical specialist supporting operations and not anything resembling a plan or merger-goal came my way. I saw that no-one in Genesis ever asked anything about what I did or how the introduction of Genesis workflows and processes might impact the legacy Sun systems and workflows that had not yet been dismantled. The result was sometimes complete chaos. No-one in Genesis made any attempt to understand what they were replacing nor the impact of introducing new processes on different but related Sun processes. There was an arrogance in Kennett Square. They knew everything and you could not tell them anything. If something went wrong during the merger it was always attributed to a ‘Sun problem’. Perhaps nothing foreshadowed this merger more than some email threads I received from Genesis people early in 2013. These email threads were up to ten or eleven pages along and each recipient was expected to read through the entire thread to attempt to understand what the forwarder could have summarized in three lines. These emails originated between Genesis employees sometimes months prior and in the early exchanges when the recipients thought they were only going to be communicating with Genesis staff they shared the rudest and most disparaging remarks abut Sun and Sun employees. I later heard from the several new friends I did make in the Genesis organization that these critical remarks and put-downs of Sun were regularly expressed by Genesis managers and executives in Kennett Square meetings when they thought they were probably exhorting their people by demeaning Sun. What a pity and what a waste. There were many good people in Sun who cared about their work and what they were doing. Most of them have been let go or have now left on their own. If you are a Genesis investor I would ask where the money is? Where are the promised savings? Doubtless any loss will be blamed on Sun but did Genesis not do any diligence prior to the deal? Did they not investigate what they were buying? Neither I nor any of my Sun colleagues up through the VP level ever fielded any detailed inquiry about our daily operations. Perhaps the guys at the top just traded spreadsheets and assumed that was all there was? There are no savings now and they are desperately looking for ways to cut costs. Don’t be distracted by talk of further acquisitions. That’s just designed to take your eye off the ball.