Kaiser Permanente Reviews

Pros

Variety of opportunities, technological advancements, diversity in management

Cons

A lot of bureaucracy and oversight requiring excessive status reporting and planning.

Pros

Very diverse workforce & culture.

Cons

Too much variance from facility ti facility.

Pros

Pay and benefits, pt population

Cons

Lots of burned out staff and physicians

Advice to Senior Management

Enforce 0 tolerance for bad behavior by the MD's

Pros

Good money, good work-life balance, lots of locations so there are a lot of opportunities.

Cons

Leadership difficult to understand at times. Really big company so sometimes very slow moving.

Pros

Good work life balance, team-work, training

Cons

Not enough advancement opportunities, Career growth

Pros

Healthcare benefits (including $5 co-pay for appointments and $5 prescriptions)

Cons

Management is incompetent and doesn't know how to deal with its employees. It's about who you know. Management is hired or people are promoted with the best connections and relationships with others higher up.

Advice to Senior Management

Learn to listen to your workers and to not ignore what they say. Learn no how to deal with employees.

Pros

the benefits package is amazing if you can make it to retirement age
many of the colleagues are wonderful to work with

Cons

the hours worked that are not compensated and having to deal with management that treats you like a cog in a wheel; to do the job even if your private life suffers; the lack of flexibility

Advice to Senior Management

one of the reasons that companies like Google do so well with their employees is that they listen and try to accomodate; you need to treat employees as part of the team and not as the help

Pros

It's an OK place to work. Good salary. Good work/life balance.

Cons

Upper mgmt sucks. No clue

Advice to Senior Management

Get a clue..

Pros

Opportunity to network and build relationships.

Cons

Very hierarchal and bureaucratic. Too many chiefs and not enough indians.

Pros

Kaiser's benefits and salaries compare favorably to other health care organizations.
Kaiser is at the forefront in the field of health informatics.
There are a lot of people who are dedicated to improving quality and customer service and moving in the direction of becoming patient centered.

Cons

Treatment of laid off non-union long-term employees is pretty shabby: no efforts to retain or rehire employees who don't have a disciplinary, oh, sorry, corrective action history; no significant HR support ( Of course, given the state of the HR dept. itself, that's not surprising).

Kaiser is a BIG company, and like all big organizations (corporations, unions, government), at some point most of the energy is devoted to maintaining the infrastructure and status quo and the needs of the individual (member or employee) get lost in the bureaucracy.

Advice to Senior Management

Stop the fragmentation of HR services. Walk the talk and give employees the tools and provide support so that they can THRIVE ( handing them a glossy brochure does not count).
Don't let the bureaucracy and standardization get in the way of innovation.