Same - Case Manager HopeSource Employee Review

Benefits, Leadership, community involvement, value driven/mission oriented attitude

small rural community, flat organization

People at the ground or mid-management level are great people. Great work to do (helping people). Fufilling work if you are really good at it. Working with some of the clients can be challenging but rewarding. You can really make a difference in someone's life. A lot of the other employees are really great people. I would not have been able to advance my career in this field without the experience gained here.

My entire time worked there we were understaffed. Upper-level management is highly disconnected from the ground level workers so they make arbitrary decisions that have no basis in reality and they are continuing to run the organization as if it were the dark ages. There are a lot of disruptions in day-to-day activities because of the unpredictable and toxic environment this creates. There was an instance where the upper management thought it would be the best idea to pull everyone into a room and threaten to fire the entire housing department staff because they didn't know how to manage a very simple personality conflict. We went through a culture audit and hired multiple consulting firms to address it but it had little to no effect on the day to day operations and upper management, where the root of the issue was. This audit cost the organization over six figures and accomplished nothing. The upper management attempts to micro-manage which gets passed down through mid-level onto the workers. You basically have to justify nearly every minute of your day, even if you are completing your tasks (and then some) just fine. Most of the upper-management has little to no social service background. I personally know of at least one instance of the upper management having to forge records to fulfill a grant they actually completely forgot about (failed to manage/implement for over a year). Due to the shortage of staff, most of the roles are transitioning to being paper-pusher roles with high case loads which means very little relationship/rapport development with clients which is very important in the field of social service. Also, most of the upper management is directly related to each other even though it's a clear conflict of interest outlined in their own HR policies. The pay continually lagged behind the community average and they offered little to no flexibility in the schedule to accommodate personal life other than paid leave which accrues disgustingly slow unless you've been there for over 5 years. This is essential when you are dealing with potential crisis situations on a regular basis. Not sure why the pay was so low considering there were multiple grants I worked on that I never charged my time to. When I last worked there, they were 'discussing' a flexible schedule and working from home as being an option across the board but as far as I'm concerned nothing came of that. Even though there are employees that got grandfathered into working remotely full time due to the pandemic they refuse to accept it as option for anyone else. This is even more surprising because the office is far too small to house all of the employees and they refuse to let any of the non client-facing employees (IT, data entry, HR, etc) work from home regularly to save space. Maybe because they feel the need to micro manage everyone??