Highmark Health reviews

The biggest con is that you will have to work for a very poor leadership team. The leader of HMHS is someone who spent a large part of his career at a company called Accenture (for more on Accenture search on “exposing evil empire”). Since that hire many years ago, there has been a steady erosion in morale due to bad decisions, terrible execution of decisions, and just a general lack of appreciation for non-management employees. Sadly, this bad hire led to many more bad hires within upper management which has only compounded the problems. Here’s a few examples of some HMHS decisions: 1. Created a curved review process where if someone in an area was given a 5 then someone else in that area had to be given a 1. Wonder where something like that might have originated? (see aforementioned “exposing evil empire” site). This was eventually done away with but the fact it was ever adopted speaks volumes. 2. Terminated lots of good IT resources while hiring even more VPs and SVPs. Ended working remotely for many employees in other states, forcing them to either relocate back or get new jobs. 3. Opened an IT shop in India to offshore and cut costs. The problem is they usually do terrible work. Thankfully, they can’t be used in many cases because of offshore restrictions in many client contracts. As you might imagine, this plus onshore resource layoffs has done wonders for morale. 4. When areas that were stretched too thin complained about not having enough people to do the work, they told them they didn’t need more people but simply needed the people they had to work more hours. 5. In many areas, they mandated employees work extra hours in the evening several nights a week to reduce an ever-growing backlog of defects. 6. Instead of listening to the people in the trenches, they basically told them to leave if they don’t like it. If that’s not bad enough, they talk down to them like they’re idiots, stating the obvious as if it’s profound wisdom. Forces one to consider whether they are really that clueless or if they actually think their employees are that stupid. Either way, it’s troubling. I could go on and on but you get the picture. On top of these things, they have tried to transform into a vendor, selling Highmark’s applications to other BCBS plans. This has resulted in almost constant process change as they flail away trying to figure it all out.

Review applies to Health Solutions. Project overload, management expects them all to get done even if you have to work at all hours. No Work Life balance anymore. Took away telecommuting 1 to 2 days a week but not in all areas. We used to get a monetary incentive not in 2016 and executives now made it impossible to achieve. Many executives have no clue exactly what Business and System analysts actually do and are very out of touch. Morale is very low, no one is happy, people only interact with business questions its a very unhappy environment. People are leaving the company weekly, lots of knowledge going out the door. Used to be a top company to work for but not anymore.