Don't get stuck! Fight for your wage don't settle
Pros
If you're lucky enough to have a great team at your facility - it makes coming to work worth it! Patients/Residents teach you new worlds of compassion and understanding you didn't know you had. Frequent In-Services for direct care staff & nurses. Hard working Safety & Maintenance manager. Most staff is genuinely concerned about the patient/family more than any other responsibilities or duties tasked to them. Moderately generous employee benefits (e.g. birthdays, all-staff meetings, employee of the month). Smaller facilities have all staff get a chance to inter-mingle with other departments they would never interact with in a bigger facility. Tuition assistant Program is available as well as the Employee Assistance Program/Foundation.
Cons
Benefits are a joke, would be better off using state provided insurance. Mid-level management is either inadequately trained for their job or content with doing the bare minimum required. Corporate is extraordinarily out of touch with their facilities & the staff that keeps them running. Annual wage increase taken away from employees with a sad excuse as to why, it's insulting. Staff are aware of YTD losses in the company nationally. CED/Admins are dangerously close to or under the requirement of being competent. Staff is not paid correctly to reflect their time worked, OT/Double OT, referral Bonus, training, or special assignments. Staff is paid pennies & asked to go above & beyond in an impossible amount of time. Genesis policies are not enforced consistently or at all; both nepotism & favoritism take place whether management will admit it or not. Corp AP is painfully behind in actually cutting checks for their bills, it trickles down to the center. The center has to deal with angry Med Directors, Patient/Family, Vendors, & Medical Equipment companies waiting for payments from half a year ago or more. Not enough nurses are trained on how to admits thoroughly backing up unit supervisors that are left to do them on their own often going over their scheduled time to correct mistakes by the DON who should be expert in this action. The facility itself needs a major face lift but Genesis purse strings are double knotted tight. Corp meetings can often be too informal or in rare instances unprofessional. Facility management has inappropriate relationships with patients family/family friends + airs it out to other management. Unsafe discharges and last minute patient arrangements are the norm. Staff morale is often very low; work injuries, walk-outs, and turn-over are high. I wouldn't make this place your permanent home but somewhere to start and get your feet wet.