Sometimes a positive aspect of an organization's work culture can also be a negative. A major problem I encountered at Woods was the eagerness of supervisors and management to overlook staff mistakes and incompetence that caused physical or psychological injury to clients, or that put clients at risk for such injuries. Management's top priority is to keep the money flowing from the various public and private funds that pay for clients to live at Woods. When it comes to employee negligence or incompetence that puts clients at risk, management would rather look the other way than fire or formally reprimand an employee, because doing so would leave a paper trail that might, during the course of a state audit, jeopardizing funding. This is a problem at Woods Services because salaries are at the very low end of the scale, even for positions requiring professional credentials, such as licensed teacher, counselor or physical therapist. Therefore, many Woods employees are people who did not get hired elsewhere at market rates. Sometimes that is the result of factors unrelated to the employee (like the state of the local economy), but sometimes it does reflect the employee's abilities. So, if you are considering working at Woods Services, I would advise you to you think about whether you would be comfortable looking the other way, or actually lying, when you witness incidents in which clients are hurt because of staff negligence or incompetence. You will inevitably encounter this kind of situation, and you will have to be silent if you want to keep your job. (They find ways to get rid of people who are not team players.) I say "inevitably" because such incidents were so common during my time at Woods that my conscience couldn't take it any more, and I decided to move on.
