Vantaggi
I worked night shift at Harvest Home, the residential treatment center for moms and babies. I loved the clients, making breakfast, doing meds, providing night assistance with the littles so moms could get some sleep. My coworkers - the ones who were frontline support staff like me - were wonderful, but management had some real issues. I brought up issues of short staffing, aggressive/arrogant management style, and unnecessary lost opportunities to collaborate between caregiving staff and clinical staff, and in the end was fired just before I received my back vacation pay, but only after I’d fully organized a 10pg manual for the job so whoever came after me could do a better job. I loved that the very diverse staff was all-female.
Svantaggi
Management tried to control every little tiny thing, there was no room for initiative even to keep the place running smoothly. When we were short-staffed and I stayed late to help day shift, I was called out and embarrassed publicly in a staff meeting for doing too much, when every one of my coworkers had privately thanked me for stepping up in a time of need. I understand some of the reasons for management’s hyper vigilance, considering the clientele Harvest Home serves, but cracking down on their people does not help. There’s a strong tendency to work their people til they burn out and to not trust input from caregiving staff despite us having closer relationships with the clients. I did recommend this job to a friend, and she quit on her second day after management left her to a full shift in a residential environment with hard-drug-recovering strangers, alone.