Clinician - Audiologist HearingLife Employee Review

When I first started at HL, the company was owned by an American consortium who placed a high value on client care. At this time, HL was quite a good place to work as the performance targets were manageable, the workload was doable, branches were left alone to do what they did best, the management had a reasonable attitude towards their staff and the moral was quite high. Unfortunately, all good things come to and end and in the case of HL, that end was the company being purchased by William Demant Holdings (WDH). No sooner had we been notified of the takeover by WDH that everythying started going downhill in a big way. The first change everyone noticed was that management stopped listening to anything branch staff (ie, the people who actually have an understanding of the profession/environment). Not only that, but staff were strongly discouraged from expressing any form of opinion whatsosever - even if this happened to be their area of expertise. Management decided that the best approach was to micromanage branch operations down to the most minute detail. Management also decided it didn't have enough people in non-branch roles (God only knows why). As a result, the number of managers, HR personnel, marketers (who were utterly useless) and IT staff increased significantly. This obviously resulted in a significantly increased salary cost to the organisation and one guess who had to foot the bill? You guessed it - the branch staff. Comparing targets year to year, my targets were nearly double in relation to my first year at HL (in terms of Full Time Equivalence). Given that Australia has had negligible inflation for over 10 years, this speaks to the massively unrealistic expectations of management. Over time, the training clinical staff received suffered dramatically. In the early days, training was of professional content consisting of professional issues, clinical issues, device training and any other issues that clinicians felt they needed help with. After WDH took over, this all ended with all training being about aggressive sales tactics to coerce unsuspecting clients into purchasing hearing aids they often did not need. The onset of the WDH era saw the branch staff reduced to the lowest teier in the organisation. Put simply, since this time, branch staff were at the absolute mercy of anyone higher up in the structure. For branch staff to expect to be able to have a life outside of work was deemed to be not committed to the company. My own job required massive amounts of travel in my own time that I was not paid for. Even then, I was asked to increase this based on a non-existent need. Towards the end of my time at HL, the moral of our entire branch had hit rock bottom. Everyone hated being there and hugely resented the massive intrusion of management onto our daily operations. The constant expectation to meet unreasonable goals and implement unworkable practices was getting to everybody. I was the first to go and from what I have heard, I wasn't the last.