Express Scripts Reviews in Minneapolis-St. Paul, MN Area

Pros

Challenging, growth, healthy dept budgets

Cons

Long work days, too much turn over, outsourcing too much, too much of a bottom line company

Advice to Senior Management

Do we have to live in such a cut-throat environment?

Pros

The generous management bonus structure.

Cons

Senior Management has implemented Jack Welch Management principles: The top 20 % get all of the raises, bonuses and perks and the bottom 10% are subject to strict discipline up to and including termination. During my tenure at Express Scripts, I witnessed many collegues who were fired or laid off; much more so than any organization I was a part of. Having seen this first hand myself, I felt as if the "Sword of Damocles" was hanging over my head every day I came to work. This was very stressful for me; my family could see the toll that this stress was causing me.

Advice to Senior Management

Manage your people to the results that benefit your customers, your stockholders and your employees as a whole instead of managing them to the political agendas of the week. Also recognize the dilemma you face in implementing Jack Welch management principals when a given team has all top performers and the person managing that team has to discipline the bottom 10%. What if that team's bottom 10% are still in the top 20% of everyone else in the organization?

Pros

It's a job for people who come with no skills, and promotion opportunities are good - that is, if you come as a blank slate.

Cons

Abysmal salary levels, horrifying benefits. Plus, they lay off 10% of their work force every year, regardless of profitability. Doesn't that pretty much say people are a commodity?

Advice to Senior Management

Get your processes, other than call center, organized. This company has the most disorganized software development process I've ever seen.

Pros

Salary is on the high end of market value and benefits are on the better end of most corporate gigs.

Cons

Management is horrible. Work/life balance is non existent. My direct supervisor, who had no real power, was great, but anyone director level or above is completely out of touch about the complexity of the business and systems.

Employees are only valued with lip service. This is a Fortune 50 company and employee appreciation day consisted of watered down chili and a .39 cent mini flashlight? I appreciate that there actually IS an employee appreciation day, but that is so cheap when the company is making record profits. I'd rather have nothing than such a chintzy display.

I know most companies have been struggling in the recession, but ESI has not and they've been cutting jobs, benefits, increasing workloads etc as if they were in dire financial straits. Why? Because they can take advantage of workers in a bad economy. I mean why eliminate casual Fridays at locations that don't really have client contact? What is the purpose in that? To show the employees who is boss literally.

It was by far the worst 4 years of my professional life and I used to work in a group home where I had to brush dog crap out of someone's teeth and change people's diapers and THAT was a better job than working at ESI. No amount of money made it worth it to stay there.

I am now at a place where I am respected and treated with dignity and have a great work/life balance. Once the economy improves, I'm sure people will leave ESI in droves until management is forced to begin treating their employees like valued human beings again in order to have any staff at all.

Advice to Senior Management

Eventually you will lay off or lose to turnover a critical mass of employees who know what's going on with your very complex business and then there will be a swift downward spiral of your stock. Your people are your biggest assets. You have forgotten that. You may be lining your pockets now, but it won't last forever and your mis-management will eventually be discovered. But why should you care or worry? You have your golden parachutes to ride smoothly down, unlike all the people you have thrown screaming from the plane with moth eaten parachutes that don't open. You should all be ashamed of yourselves.

Pros

The salaries are still competitive with the industry. The benefits are decent. There are opportunities for advancement into management for those so inclined.

Cons

Management is short sited. They are focused on quarterly Wall Street returns rather than long term stability and integrity. Technicians are being phased out and offshored. If you desire a technical career path, this is not the place for you. It won't be long before ESI will have no inhouse technical expertise.

Advice to Senior Management

Implement the calibration of middle mgmt performed by non-management staff. Place the lowest 20% of middle mgmt on a performance improvement plan and lay them off if their performance (as deemed by those who report to them) does not improve within a specified amount of time.

Pros

Decent benefits, annual bonus, nice cafeteria, a free bag on employee appreciation day, and e-mail from the CEO's secretary congratulating you on a service anniversary..

Cons

Incompetent upper managment. Our IT director 's previous job was at a brewery and explained that to truly understand the company, he spent a day in the brewery and doing deliveries, so, for us to understand Express Scripts, we should go visit its automated mail-order pharmacy. If that doesn't show a total misunderstanding of the complexity of a pharmacy benefit management company, I don't know what does. Yet these are the guys making the IT decisions. Funny how none of the major screwups of recent software releases and the costs involved in fixing them make it into the management slide shows or the press.

Advice to Senior Management

Treat people with respect. Go back to ranking them objectively, instead of trying to force people out by ranking them poorly when they don't deserve it. The customer base is already seeing the quality suffer and soon the stock market will, too. To the VP who said "we don't hire foreigners", he must have gone to the Bill Clinton school of parsing words. If ESI is hiring a company to recruit IT workers and that company is hiring foreigners for ESI, then ESI is hiring foreigners. Believe me, I was surrounded by them everyday.

Pros

The people that you work with

Cons

Upper management is frequently deceitful

Advice to Senior Management

Care enough to keep your employees that you have held in the same position for years because they are too important to lose before they put their resignation in. People want a company that care to retain employees before they get to that point. Let them get their chance to interview for promotions - they will at least keep their knowledge within the company rather than leave the company and you get two weeks to find someone to replace them and get up to speed before they are gone for good.

Pros

very good salary and good bonus
Good benefits
good group of employees (what is left of them)

Cons

Out sourcing resulting in inferior quality.
This move, which was to save money, is resulting in huge increases in project hours, increased employee hours, and inferior work. This is causing delays and issues for clients and the business.

Senior management - lack of ethics, interested only in short term goals and profits, no respect for employees.
They have admittedly perverted the performance system for their own use to force out employees instead of paying severance. They use a popularity system, commonly called calibration, to rank employees irregardless of performance. They intent ally cause employees stress, uncertainty and concern to force them to quit so they make their head count and get their bonuses. They have implied that good quality is "just good enough" and "we need to get it done to meet our dates and we'll fix it later"
Total disregard for the "Express Way". They have thrown away Ethics and Mutual Respect.

Advice to Senior Management

replace all IT senior management with ethical individuals.

Pros

Good paid time off and nice building.

Cons

The leadership at ESI is not educated and not classy. This is a very dysfunctional and hostile workplace. This is the worst place I have ever worked in my entire life!

Advice to Senior Management

There needs to be a more professional atmosphere.

Pros

Average Benefits Package - nothing special at all
Nice Co-Workers - one of the few good things about this place
Work Location is Convenient

Cons

Wow - where to start - this company used to be a fairly decent place to work - but over the last two years they have shifted to a very heavy emphasis on contract labor - over twenty five percent of their work force is now contractors.

The Bloomington location is a complete mess - so many IT employees have been laid off over the last year that many knowledgeable people are gone and they are replaced by contractors - not employees. With annual March bonuses paid out - more and more people are leaving voluntarily - they are so fed up with the work environment - laid off workers are not replaced so those left have to take on extra work. The bloomington location is slowly being down-sized through lay-offs and through people who are just sick and tired of management and how they are treating this location - management has to be in a panic given the number of people that are leaving that location. I'm sure they though they could control the downsizing and the job market would keep people there until they were ready to dismiss people - but that's not what is happening - people are leaving faster than they can deal with it. The Bloomington location has not hired new employees in a long time - people leave and are not replaced.

The performance review process is a complete joke - forced ranking process so there is always a percentage of people who get low ratings - it just has to be that way - only so many people can get rated highly - so what you actually do over the course of a year really doesn't matter - it doesn't mean you will be recognized for it.

The company does not recognize people - they rarely do any company recognition events as they are too cheap!!! For a company that made a billion in profit last year they could do a much better job - this is not a good place to work any longer so you would be better served looking elsewhere.

Advice to Senior Management

Don't be so cheap - survey your employees once in a while so you know what your employees thinking and act on those results - management never survey's employees because they don't care what employees thinks.