ReEmployability Reviews

It's with a heavy heart that I find myself writing such a negative review for this company. When I first signed on with them, I loved what the goal of ReEmployability seemed to be; getting those who were injured put into the community doing work so they could be a part of something bigger, all while earning their regular pay and recovering faster truly sounded like somewhere I would want to be, unlike other companies that I may not agree with more. In my time of working here, the voice of the injured worker has started to sound less and less like it is their priority, and more about cutting corners and staying afloat. My position specifically is considered the bottom rung, despite how integral we are to the company's smooth operation. You can especially feel this in the way other positions don't quite grasp why we do the things we do, or the requests we have. Even in company meetings, like the day I was let go from the company, they seldom bring up our department to be celebrated in their glorification of numbers. It is a morale damager to the entire team, even if nobody else is willing to directly say it. Senior leadership has made questionable decisions and moves, as I can unfortunately say with the team lead we have/had. While I think they are in no means a bad person, their "leadership" straddles the line between coaching and straight up bullying. To phrase as one of my coworkers so aptly put it, "[Our supervisor] has a strong personality, and fails to see the error in pushing us when we are already pushing ourselves to exhaustion." In her newly acquired position, she seemed far more concerned and like praising the team she had come from rather than us for our hard work. She frequently gets up and walks away from our team to go engage in chatting with them, yet decides to crack down on our team when we do the same. The company has mixed signals with the regular need for social interaction, to the point where the HR representative stepped into our team meeting to crack down on it further. I cannot speak for the scrutiny our team leads are put under, but I can say that is something that is desperately needing a revisit in their agenda. While I have only been in one position and climbed as far as I could without being the team lead for the administrative position, there are so many others within the company who are too scared to speak out to the way this company simply is apathetic at best and toxically hovering over work at their worst. Please take these words from a still employed acquaintance, as they definitely shine a light on the overbearing and unrealistic workloads these few employees have been going through. "I don't think that they have any intention to promote anybody anymore, or either give them extra pay. With all the extra responsibilities that [my current role] has actually been doing, we're all back to square one of being overwhelmed again." The prior quote, while a shared sentiment in the company, is not outright spoken but more in the tired and beaten stares each person seems to exchange with one another. For those who are willing to speak this sentiment, it's in hushed whispers or far away from where cameras can hear. It's incredibly depressing and heartbreaking that, for the work this company promotes itself on doing, that this is how their workers feel. The reason for not sharing goes from the fact that employees do not trust upper management to take care of them, to the fact that those who have expressed their feelings about how they are being treated are quick to be fired. I have seen multiple coworkers to varying degrees of closeness get terminated for their views on the company and after either going to HR or senior leadership. Reasons for firing prior employees, especially ones who had been with the company for such a long time, are baffling. A team lead of a newer position at our job got fired for online posts regarding their political stance. These posts were in no way connected to the ReEmployAbility brand, and the person posting them in no way spoke as such, and yet they found not even regular reprimanding or the request to remove them, but a quick termination. Another employee, who had been with the company for over a decade found themselves unfairly fired, as they were being demoted from their position despite prior meetings with their team lead and upper management contradicting that sentiment. "The problem was they were sitting there telling me how much I sucked and for how long which I knew wasn't true." Due to this employee declining the position, they technically quit the job rather than being terminated from the position. "I had to get off the ReEmployAbility Rollercoaster. I couldn't take the weirdness and the lies, and I've been underpaid for years." I would also like to talk about a closer coworker who had been terminated from the position I am in months before I was, someone who had shown incredible prowess and knowledge for the role that they were one. This coworker due to extenuating circumstances could not make it into the office and was working remote for about a year's time, something nobody on the administrative team had issue with. While we did have to print out her work, it took only an extra minute of our time to do so. Despite this and the dedication they had given to the company, working out of an extended stay hotel with a partner, they decided to let them go from the company. I took the initiative to bring all of her desk decorations to her in person, and the life they had certainly took a toll on them. They looked exhausted, concerningly thin, and the person they had been staying with took up all of their time when they were not actively working. Seeing what state they were leaving them for made it incredibly clear if it had not yet been that this job simply did not care for it's employees. I have talked a lot about how others had been treated and the general atmosphere the employees have faced, but it would be remiss to not talk about some of the things that happened to me while I worked here. In my time, I had three team leads, the first two being wonderful people- the kind of people who truly make the distinction between the titles "team lead" and "boss." I have had my own extenuating life events happen, and even when the prior two team leads had to coach me there was no weird sort of undertones to those conversations. With the team lead I had prior to termination, this felt different. On a day where I was doubled over in physical pain due to a feminine medical emergency, my team lead insisted on pulling me into HR to talk about my hygiene and how I needed to be better about it or I would be terminated. The entire time I was holding my stomach and trying to stay upright while they continued to talk about this issue. I made it clear I was in physical pain and had requested this conversation wait, but there was no sympathy or empathy granted in this moment. I remember crying and telling them I was falling apart, and being met with criticism and being told to go home and take the time out of my PTO bucket despite having all hours from a separate "wellness time" bucket still there. I am well aware what the handbook says Wellness Time is meant to be used for, IE check ups and physicals, but the pretenses I was sent home under that day should have been reconsidered. In an incredibly short span of time, the company terminated 3 people from the administrative team, bringing the rest of us into a meeting backing up their choice in team lead and essentially saying, "If you don't trust us, leave." The reception of this meeting was bleak and disappointing to those of us who were forced to attend, especially after the last person to be fired was weeping as they took apart all of their desk decorations, begging for the rest of us to not get fired as unfairly as they were and calling our team lead something along the lines of a prison officer for the way she had begun to run the team. In the severe lack of people, we all rushed to pick up the remaining slack as best we could. It was a wild race in keeping up with our workload, but I kept up with it, and as far as I'm aware any quality issues were brought to my attention and I quickly dealt with them. In my most recent annual review, with one of the few members of senior leadership who people put their trust in and my team lead, I had been given a considerably well review with praise. I bring this up for two reasons, one which is important to note immediately; my team lead brought up how I'd been "doing so much better with my hygiene", which made me feel uncomfortable. When offered to move over the topic I agreed quickly so not to embarrass myself in front of a male coworker about an obviously sensitive topic. Despite this, the team lead instead lingered on it and even continued to bring it up in our monthly meetings between me and them. I cannot speak for how the senior leadership attending felt about the matter, though I was incredibly uncomfortable as it is both a sensitive topic and a member of the opposite sex, making it even weirder to bring up. Up to the point of my firing, a few weeks after my 2 year anniversary, I had not been made aware of anything else being wrong with my day save for a time tracking issue, which was amended. I was outperforming for my tier, and still assigning out work and assisting when requested of me. When I was pulled into my termination meeting, I was given the reasonings of "halt in performance in the afternoon." When I explained this is because I am most productive in the morning and spend the rest of my time assigning out and assisting others, HR chimed in to say that with the way I do my work, it was as though I was "working a 30 hour week when [I] was scheduled for 40 hours, which isn't okay." When I asked what they wanted me to be doing in this down time, I was told I should have been asking my team lead for guidance. While in most situations this could be taken as genuinely good criticism, I did not have faith I would be given a task that wasn't there for the sake of just doing something to look busy, a practice I personally despise. Not only that, but it would be unfair to add even more to my workload without an increase in my pay, which management has made it clear time and time again they "can't do it." I was also given the reason that I had been caught sleeping at my desk the day prior and the same day, which was not even the case; I had a headache and looking at the lights of my computer constantly hurt, so I had opted to close my eyes and put my head down for a bit, taking frequent checks at all of the queues to see if anything was needed or available. The paper I was given said my reason for termination was Job Performance and Reflection of the Company. I was part of the ambassadors, a group of people who HR had get out information about things going on in the company and a pulse check for certain events. I, while not attending parties, assisted where I feasibly could. The social events of this job had revolved around alcohol, a substance I don't particularly enjoy partaking of, so I politely declined most of them. Despite my "sleeping" on the job and the things that I was coached on within the few years of being with this company, a lot of my coworkers had to come to respect me and expect quick and precise work from me. As of leaving this company, I am only sad that I am leaving the people I got to know behind and not being a part of the process that I assumed was for the greater good, for people in need of that assistance. There are so many further things I have left out of this review, and I''m aware Passion, Integrity, Partnerships, Entrepreneurship, and Service Oriented; while these words are written on the core value wall, this company has all but forgotten what they truly mean to them. Their current workforce finds different words written on the wall; uncertainty, doubt, and broken trust.