- lack of union representatives when they state they have a rep through the company that is available to speak to, they actually do not have any one, and in fact, do not like when items of union issues are presented to them they react poorly to it.
- Teams is used to chat communicate between co-workers, though is monitored remotely and any communications of union-speak, issues with the company, or expressing concerns etc in personal messaging environment, can and will be screen shot and used against you as an attack from management for any reason they see fit. You are expressly prohibited from limiting the amount of notifications from various chats (a lot of which do not pertain to your specific targeted work load) nor are you allowed to close out teams altogether as they remotely check in your monitors and can see you do not have it open, resulting in punishments.
- position changes are used a means of punishment without the ability to defend yourself and can be demoted to standard CSR position as a result of a call gone wrong, though instructed by both management as well as their "informative documents" that suggested otherwise, and is not accepted as a valid reason for the call being presented incorrectly.
- Recent PA layoffs resulted in over 100 employees being laid off from PA, resulting directly, with employees whom are working for NY being transferred to PA specific work as a means to cover PA and save the company money, labelled as "reorganization" of the company.
- If residence is out of state, access to legal boards with hourly wages, health time / PTO time is not easily accessible as positions are teleworking, even though they state that they are for the federal government, though actually locating them is hard and can hide if your PTO is different than NY. As I reside in WA state I have specific health time that was denied for the entire year of 2023 that I had to fight with them in 2024 and remove the charges against my person based on the accessibility of these hourly wages data that they are legally supposed to have available to me, which would have removed my time from being submitted incorrectly and being reprimanded for.
- Work Accommodations are accepted, but after 3 months of submission can and will NOT reach out suggesting on the 4th month that they have expired and need to resubmit them, however, legally, they do not expire unless providers or new forms are submitted to suggest the disability or health accommodation necessary has been healed or is no longer the case, they attempt to rip that assistance out from underneath you, for no logical or explained reason as to why they canceled it, other than "they expired on XYZ date"
- consistently inconsistent as an excuse for company poor behavior is tossed around a lot, when clarification and consistency is needed by you as an employee or an explanation is needed to better understand, they will say all the time that HMK is consistently inconsistent just like any other company. This suggests that they are okay with toxic behavior simply on the basis that other companies in the US are terrible so they are okay being toxic and terrible because they are a company instead of the drive to want to be better or different from these toxic companies, showing complacency to simply "You can't beat them join them" mentality instead.
- Toxic family dynamic is expressed, where communications are made behind employees backs to an alarmingly high school level and will be used against you in some fashion. Completely toxic and back-stabbing behavior for anything negative against the company. If anything is said in confidence to co-workers in any fashion that they deem gossip worthy or shady, it will make it's rounds somehow through the chats and through each other and will mock you and treat you differently should you meet up again with them for meetings etc.
- Workloads are changing constantly, with it ending up with more work that you were initially told would occur and the excuses presented are based on the paperwork you receive upon your hiring the clause that reads "Your position and work duties can alter at any time due to Highmark as seen necessary." Any requests to remove work-load or adjust work-load are overlooked.
- Questions or communications for assistance are typically ignored with several days occurring between responses. In this time, calls that are on hold (in the form of tickets in your to-do work list) will sit and age. Any ticket that ages past 10 days is publicly listed for everyone to see in Teams chat as a "reminder" to finish them on the 10th day because they are aged and looks bad on the company. However, any attempts to reiterate you asked someone and did not response, you are then asked to submit screenshots of said message in Teams to management as proof so that the person or persons whom did not respond are simply thrown under the bus encouraging a Tattle-tell mentality should a ticket be presented wrong or ticket mishandled in some fashion. Especially if another manager gave you this instruction, they encourage the screen shots of proof to throw them under the bus and change the ruling once again on how to operate certain tasks.
- Suggestion boxes presented to the teams at one point have now since vanished suggesting they do not actually care about suggestion boxes and that what is being sent has legitimacy but are ignored either way, so the suggestion box is rendered useless.
-They pride themselves on effective communications whether to members, to employees, to the public, however, do not. They do not like to notify employees of changes unless it is less than 24 hours before the changes take place, employees were not notified of the reason WHY they would be helping PA other than reorganization of the company and needing to chip in and help PA with their issues, but never ONCE expressed it was due to layoffs, nor any indication that those whom would be taking on PA's workload would be getting any compensation for the extra work, nor as a company provide clear, concise information to members who's main basis of the calls received are out of confusion for why coverages' did not take place for services for various reasons or why we did or didn't pay providers in claims etc. Communication is not their main concern, just thrusting upon people the policies and expectations whenever they see fit, usually with a manager being emailed randomly one day, then passing the buck to us through Teams on a whim out of left field of these "new" expectations that you just have to deal with.
- lack of understanding for mothers with kids at all, whom see tele-working jobs easier for balance to handle kids at home with babysitting or child care is not available for them to handle. If you have your kids on camera, on the calls with you, with them in the room with you, you are reprimanded heavily that it is not allowed, while also not providing assistance for child care, or acknowledge this rulings when pets show in cams or are making noise on calls, seemingly to allow pets in the rooms with zero issues, but children whom are too young to be left alone, crying or playing, are punished through the employee, and do no care to offer assistance with child care or day care services to alleviate this issue.
- EXTREMELY HIGH TURN OUT. Since I was hired in 2022, I have seen over 2 dozen employees whom are emailed out in large group messages in Outlook indicating "Good Morning, Please be advised that (Insert Name here) is no longer an employee of Highmark Health. If there are any questions, concerns, or open issues, please reach out to (insert Manager name here) directly." While I could inquire about these people no longer working with the company, we have never been expressly explained if it was a fire or a quit situation, we just are supposed to accept this change occurred and move on. Which is really concerning and curious to see over the time I have been with the company.
- Expectations to keep calls within a specific time frame, limiting that time smaller and smaller as employees can show it is possible to finish the calls with less time that previously granted for calls, all while maintaining adherence to specific percentages and changes to Avaya Aux situations for each call type require permissions to change and valid reasons to do so. If you make these changes without approval, you can be in trouble by having a less than a staggering 95% adherence requirement of calls, resulting in documentations on your profile with the company and can result in either issues with pay with time-cards not properly being fixed, and elimination from the company as a direct result of not maintaining that high percentage in EVERY SINGLE CALL ALL THE TIME. Too high expectations with shrinking ability to perform these calls accurately and thoroughly for the member, the entire point of the call is to help people and is becoming a numbers race to do as many calls as possible in short amounts of times through the day with no relief or accommodation on human error.
- Increased implementation of technology towards the elderly demographic whom repeatedly state that they cannot handle technology nor understand it, yet any "updates" to the company reflect increased dependency on tech that MA demographics still further do not understand at all and refuse to use. Need a simpler system to operate without needing to remote into someones computer to help them out. Especially when we are not IT specialists and are not being paid extra as IT when performing these tasks, insane expectation to be able to do this with a 3 minute after call expectation to document and 13 min 30 sec time limit on the calls themselves. insane expectations to do this scope of work for hourly wages.
