Kaiser Permanente reviews

Rarely does Kaiser promote from within. Management does not listen to staff, treats staff extremely poorly. Often I feel as if my colleagues and I are being disciplined by management, as if we were school children in the principal's office. Management's condescending attitude really reflects the fact that morale here is low, and there is not much incentive to even try to do anything more than the bare minimum in terms of level of effort. The fact that management treats the staff so poorly and yet expects to be treated like gods is appaling. Even worse, contractors are treated like second class citizens to staff, and we lose a lot of good talent since there is a 12 month maximum rule that applies to contracted employees. The general environment and morale here is very low. There aren't many team building initiatives, and typically, if you ever question anything here, the answer is normally: "That is just Kaiser Kulture. Deal with it." If you have ever seen the movie "Office Space".... that is sort of what it is like here... but worse.

Where do I start? Almost everything's a joke. From the incompetence & cost overruns of our IT dept to all the political infighting and bureaucracy, this place is a complete mess. Apparently this is what happens in a monstrously large organization that's not-for-profit. Most of the senior managers have been with the company forever. They've become thoroughly accustomed to the "Kaiser way," i.e. low quality work getting done at a snails pace through a process of tedious negotiations. Too many cooks in the kitchen, and there usually isn't an executive chef. Just a bunch of sous chefs running around like idiots. It's probably the least empowering environment possible because at the end of the day, you realize that your work has no real impact on the 160,000-employee monster known as Kaiser Permanente. If you're a young person looking to move up quickly, then this is definitely not the place for you. Here you'll be surrounded by a bunch of mediocre 9-to-5ers, and management will ask you to wait your turn regardless of your performance. On top of that, they have all these idiotic rules such as: raises are capped at 10%, or promotions can only be given after a certain number of performance evaluation cycles. They do a poor job of addressing underperformance, and they're horrible at rewarding excellence. And company culture? What company culture? It's just a job. Everybody shows up, puts in their hours, and goes home. That Thrive campaign? It's just a marketing gimmick. There isn't a single company policy that actually encourages their employees to "Thrive." Of course all of this depends on the department and manager, but generally speaking, this is what I've seen so far at Kaiser. Thrive, baby!