ACT Team - Anonymous employee Carolina Outreach Employee Review

Work/ Life Balance Great environment

Lack of communication Lack of notice

Most of the employees you work with daily are great. The clients are usually pretty great as well, & most understand that you're there to help them. It's been a good job to gain experience in the social work field as I make a career change. Being on an ACT team is making me incredibly employable, which is good because I don't plan on staying here much longer.

Oh boy. Pay is abysmal, to the point where I had to take on a second weekend job (I'm now working 7 days a week on top of being in graduate school). The benefits are laughable. My insurance went from about $60 a month last year, for the lowest coverage, to almost $700 a month for the same coverage. I now don't have insurance because I couldn't afford to pay what I pay in rent for my insurance on the salary I'm making. They took away 4 of our PTO days this year as well, & instead of having all your days at the beginning of the year to use as you need, you have to accrue them (it averages out to about 6 hours every paycheck). And if you don't have the PTO to cover a day off? You just don't get paid for that day. They also don't have holidays; when a holiday rolls around & the office is closed, you have to use a PTO day, or you don't get paid for that, either. A lot of ACT clients don't respect staff boundaries, & will call you at all hours of the day & night, regardless of whether or not you're on call. We aren't given work phones (we're given a $25 "tech" stipend for having to use our own phones & computers), & no one told me that we could make work numbers on Google Voice, so for almost a year, I was giving out my personal number to clients. The upper management only seems to care about finances & productivity. They expect every session with every client to be over an hour, even though all ACT clients have schizophrenia & if you've ever worked with that population before, you can understand how difficult that would be (some clients are borderline non-verbal). Doesn't matter, though! Gotta hit that time requirement! They also don't account for the travel time that it takes to get around larger cities, which has changed the expectation of a M-F, 9-5 to "you may have to get your notes done at home unpaid because we don't do overtime." The ACT supervisor, who has no experience with ACT, once led a conference call with all ACT staff, & it was a bloodbath of people calling her on the crap the company is selling, telling her that the company's expectations are unrealistic. As these complaints poured in, people were applauding, laughing, & having a range of other reactions. Her face became so tight with rage that I almost, for a second, felt bad for her. Then I remembered that she's making my life exponentially more difficult than it needs to be, & she's making more than I ever will at this company. I cannot stress this enough: do not work here. It's just not worth the stress, the work/life balance is garbage, & the compensation & benefits aren't worth what you experience day-to-day. Let those of us who are already here weed ourselves out, & then they're stuck with no staff. These managers need to reap what they've sewn.