Kaiser Permanente Reviews in Denver, CO Area

Pros

I have a great boss who encourages teamwork, sharing of best practices and thinking outside the box. She is quick to praise for a job well done and very appropriately provides constructive criticism when needed. She stands up for her team and realizes that by giving credit to others when due we all win. She understands that by encouraging us to be the best we can be and to be successful, ultimately the whole team is successful.

Cons

Antiquated administrative systems, having to deal with union administrative staff that have no sense of urgency, some upper management that only want to hear the good and do not want to hear about the challenges in the market.

Pros

Overall nice people except for the senior director and HR is very difficult to work with.

Cons

1) Very low salaries.
2) Poor management
3) Senior directors do not know the amount of work their employees are actually doing.
4) They do not know how to do resource allocations.
5) The physicians run the company. If they say do something, everyone jumps right on it even if it is not the most logical or strategic decision.
6) No strategic planning.

Advice to Senior Management

Spend more time understanding what your employees are working on and get to know them. Work on resource allocations and planning the work versus waiting till something happens to take action. Look at the senior director in the EMR department and her management skills.

Pros

benefits are very good and cheap.

Cons

like high school. Management was not organized.

Advice to Senior Management

give qualified employees a chance to move up.

Pros

-some coworkers are really fantastic
-nice folks overall
-good benefits, decent pay (given the current economic conditions)
-you will never NOT have enough work to do
-it "feels good" to work for a non-profit insurer who's stated corporate values (affordable health care for all, restore the middle class, etc.) align with my own

Cons

Management is unbelievably incompentent and reactive, I mean, it seriously defies comprehension. Many senior managers don't even have bachelors degrees, or if they do, it is a BSN. All promotion and recognition is based solely on who's ass you have kissed. Management is very checked out in general, but when a problem has spun out of control, then they swoop in and start stabbing people in the back. This creates an environment where everyone is watching their back, and spending so much time CYA-ing that there isn't time to do work. It also kills any sense of initiative. Why take the initiative when you are only going to get punished? Management tends to focus on corporate initiatives that are essentially meaningless, instead of improving the basics. IT dept is a joke. Backend systems are obsolete and do not meet operating requirements. System fixes are outsourced to India. Critical teams are severely under resourced, and at the same time, there is lots of dead wood.

Advice to Senior Management

Fire every incompetent and unqualified manager and hire people that are actually qualified to be managers. Better yet, promote from within. Do not hire high school graduates to manage people with advanced degrees. You do not need a ratio of 1 middle manager per 3 FTEs. If you schedule people in 6 meetings every day of the week you should not be surprised when work doesn't get done. Create a culture of accountability. Do not expect your individual contributors to work 50 to 60 hours a week when your managers barely bother to show up to work.

Note: I waited until I had been working at Kaiser for over a year before posting this, to give you a fair chance, but the problems noted above were obvious to me from the first day.

Pros

great mission and values, management seems genuinely concerned about making things better all the time

Cons

For me home office was located far away from my home.

Advice to Senior Management

Continue to reduce the number of key initiatives.

Pros

for the most part you co-workers are really nice and helpful, same with the customers.

Cons

the union is a joke...if you report something just go ahead and box up your stuff, if it can get them ahead you co-workers will throw you under the buss the first chance they get, they will do anything they can to keep you from getting benifits.

Advice to Senior Management

when you ask a question listen to the answer, even if it's not the one you want to hear.

Pros

Benefits are free, decent pay.

Cons

I worked with Inter con security wasnt actually a Kaiser employee but was treated like a Kaiser employee.

Advice to Senior Management

There was a lot of management change while I was there which made things harder to work around. This had to do with inter con security not Kaiser making the changes. Maybe Kaiser could be more involved in who they have run things with Inter Con.

Pros

Electronic health records and medical delivery system is far superior than any other insurance carrier/medical provider and KP has set the benchmark. Online capabilities for members is amazing.

Cons

Unions are problematic, union employees have little to no incentive to get things done in a timely fashion, nor do they work outside their set list of duties. Rarely do they go above and beyond. Computer system on administrative side is archiach and needs a complete overhaul.

Advice to Senior Management

Invest some profits in the administrative computer system. Develop systems that integrate and can upload, download, import, export, etc... The lack of system integration between departments is ridiculously inefficient and wastes time and money.

Pros

People are generally very nice - on the Malcom Baldrige personality rating - many "F's" or "feelers" here

Cons

Organized by the Unions, so it takes FOREVER to get process changes in place - we're not able to respond quickly enough to changes in the competitive environment. Mangers, depsite not being part of a union, are not able to negotiate for pay raises - pay raises are deteremined yearly by HR and handed out.

Advice to Senior Management

0

Pros

1) Management is not results driven so you can pretty much do whatever you want.
2) No pressure to deliver anything of value. You get a nice yearly bonus if you just show up for work.
3) Come and go as you please.

Cons

1) Zero professional development.
2) Management focused on themselves moving up - not on developing their teams.
3) Very passive aggressive organization.
4) Senior leadership did not walk their talk.
5) Senior leaders are very traditional and have out of date thinking styles. Think Qwest (now defunct) type of leadership.
6) Physician, Health Plan and Union leadership put up a good front but behind closed doors very different story.
7) Care delivery people in general very unhappy. Middle management is lost. Senior management totally out of touch. Executives (about 30 of them) busy building glass walls (literally) to shut out the noise.

Advice to Senior Management

1) Be results oriented.
2) Delayer management. Way to many layers.
3) Get rid of the enormous amount of low performing senior leaders.