Crumbling Culture and Better Benefits Working At Starbucks - Recensione dipendente - Client Services presso bswift

As many have mentioned in their reviews, the culture at bswift is shifting. I would even go the extra mile to say that it's fallen apart beyond the point of repair. bswift was a great place to be 5 years ago, but they were acquired by Aetna, who changed a lot about the culture but let them retain some of their identity. In comes CVS for another acquisition, and things have not been the same since. The focus at bswift is now to bring in as much revenue as possible, oftentimes overlooking the capacity of the teams who must shoulder the burden. This extends from our Implementation teams, to the Product Management Teams and all the way down to Client Services. In short, it’s affecting every single team negatively. The worst part of this is that bswift was (at one point) a genuinely great benefit admin platform and that can no longer be said. The last few years of software development have been dedicated solely to the new jumbo clients our sales teams bring in who also bring in the coin. This means that almost all dev and PM resources are dedicated to custom projects that only benefit specific jumbo clients and leave our legacy clients drowning in bugs, broken technology and false promises of repair. In short- bswift as a software is now a patchwork of quick fix solutions that are deployed without reason and constantly break other things in the background of the system. This means that the site crashes and goes offline a few hours a week every two weeks or so. This has been happening for almost a year with no end in sight. This means that almost every role at bswift has been reduced to trying to explain why the site is one oops error after another and having to make false promises to clients that broken technology has been escalated and is slated for an upcoming fix. People are literally being trained to set false expectations, which just creates more escalations and more client frustrations. In my last few months at bswift, I had several clients tell me not to apologize or make excuses anymore because they understood all of it was just to save face. Do you want a job that is 95% having to apologize for things you can’t fix and then promising solutions that you know will never happen? In turn, all of this creates endless manual “work-arounds” that the Client Services teams end up having to take on because, understandably so, our clients don’t want to be taking on manual work that they pay us to automate. These issues have created and endless rotating door of employee turn-around. Employees from leadership, down to the call center are dropping like flies. In my dept alone, 23 people quit within six months. Most of those people were veteran bswifters who were the true innovators and best employees we had to offer. Once people started noticing that all of them were leaving, morale dropped at a rapid pace and other people started to leave as well. This has created an even bigger problem, because management can’t keep up with the backfills to provide relief to those who have to take on the extra work. If you take a job at bswift, fully expect to be doing the job of 2-3 people in your role, as well as 2-3 jobs of people in the role beneath you and maybe above you as well. Now let’s talk about culture. Culture is something bswift loves to pride themselves on. As someone who was at bswift before the Titanic was 75% underwater, I can tell you that even before the worst- bswift never truly understood what culture was. bswift has never invested in understanding who their employees were or what made their workforce unique. To them, culture was throwing a party here and there, giving out bswift-branded Dollar Store sunglasses every two years and buying us a sheet cake from Costco on the company’s anniversary. It wasn’t until late 2020 that bswift took a look in the mirror and asked themselves what culture really was or how they could foster it to truly engage their workforce and this only happened because of the tidal wave of resignations. The culture at bswift is basically one big fraternity/sorority where the cool kids rule everything. In order to be a cool kid, you have to kiss up to a lot of people who love to see themselves as the next Steve Jobs and put in a whole lot of extra hours without making a single fuss about it. I’m talking nights, weekends, holidays… I worked on Christmas Eve well into the night several times and didn’t get as much as a simple thank you or sign of acknowledgment from my boss. We used to say that fall was our busy season because of Open Enrollment but those days are over. The truth is that with the volume of work and clients we take on, Open Enrollment volume happens year-round with no end in sight. If you are reading this and still trying to talk yourself into accepting a job here, let me also tell you that bswift has a major race problem. Diversity is nothing but a buzz-word here. Sure, we hire a lot of POC, but guess what? 90% of those POC are hired to work in the call center and never get to work there long enough to advance to any other position or department. When we still worked in the office, you could step into the call center and it was like stepping back in time to segregation. Why? Well, because the call center is primarily black employees and if you walk around the office, you’ll notice that there are very little to no other black employees at the company. Several times I tried to recruit POC from the call center into my dept and was shot down by leadership with the implication that people in the call center weren’t smart or talented enough to join other teams, which is false because several former call center employees have risen up the ranks in other departments… the difference? Most of THOSE former call center employees were white. The 2020 racial discourse that overtook most corporations also hit at bswift, and they ended up creating a Diversity Council to address the issues. What came of that council? The decision to hire more black people into entry-level positions and to eventually invest in their career development to allow them to move beyond the call center. That sounds like a great initiative doesn’t it? The problem is it never happened. That’s the messaging leadership delivered on quarterly calls, but as someone who was involved in that council and saw the numbers first-hand, I can tell you that the promise never came to be. We did end up hiring a few more black people, but guess where they went? Directly into the call center. I sat on several of the diversity calls and listened to management and leadership tear down concerns of racism, prejudice and unconscious bias from employees with real life examples time after time. It got to the laughable point where the committee started with several POC and by the time I left, almost a year after its inception had 1 POC still actively involved who still got shot down for every idea. bswift knows their culture is toxic and that it enables racism and instead of listening to their affected employees, they love to say that they are sorry the victim experienced things in a way that was hurtful to them, but that ultimately what they experienced is not what bswift is about. Another large area of concern at bswift is career development. If you want a job where you want to advance over the years and climb through many different positions- looks elsewhere. As previously mentioned, bswift is a popularity club- where your merits are what matter least. If you’re not faking it with the “everything is awesome” crew, you’re not moving anywhere. They will acknowledge that you’re a hard worker and reward you with more work, and miniscule raises. I’m talking 1-2% increases. You would also think that with the increasing turnover rate they would take advantage of the opportunity to promote from within and reward those who put in the work- not at bswift! At bswift, we rather hire externally than provide the better opportunities and pay to our own people. This adds fuel to the fire of an unscalable system with no fix in sight, because now it means we also hire people with zero bswift experience who can’t help their teams or understand anything about the bswift infrastructure. This is where you will be hit extra hard if you’re dedicated and hard-working; you’re going to be doing all those people’s jobs. Did I mention that our benefits are flaming garbage? Isn’t that ironic? A benefit admin company owned by one of the biggest healthcare and insurance companies in the world offers their employees some of the WORST benefits imaginable. You will get better benefits working at Starbucks than you will working at bswift. Also the pay is trash. You will not be paid well at bswift. In fact, bswift underpays most roles by about 20k compared to the market average. They might offer you a nice sum up front to get you in the door, but as mentioned, the raises they give us are criminal and basically keep you in the same pay range for five years. We barely even get to roll over any PTO anymore. If you live in the city of Chicago, they will allow you to carry over 60 hours of PTO on a yearly basis, but if you live outside Cook County, that number is reduced to 40. Keep in mind that with how much work there is and how many people are constantly quitting- that leaves almost no time for you to take PTO. So if you want to throw away your hard-earned PTO, look no further. This is the place for you!