Pros
-Working from home was beneficial for a time. -The Team Leads are mostly tolerable when you prove to them you know your stuff, they stop micromanaging. -Part of the benefits included mental health counseling -If you asked with enough notice, it was easy enough to get time off approved. - Serving people who really needed an empathetic ear was gratifying. - It felt like a huge accomplishment to feel competent at my job, there was so much to remember and keep current on that being good at my job felt significant.
Cons
I hardly know where to start.... -My biggest issue is that ComPsych pretends to serve the clients (employees of various companies), but they mostly just use counseling as a means of manipulating/gaslighting people into staying at their terrible jobs. The corporation serves the interests of other corporations, it doesn't care about the people behind said organizations. People call in with serious issues at work and probably need to quit, instead we just direct them to a counselor and provide emotional support. -They advertise it as a "clinical triage and mental health" position but you're really just a phone operator who has to do extra de-escalation work. Over half of your calls will be people calling the wrong department, the wrong number, or not knowing what we offer for services. A lot of people call in looking for an instant mental health counselor or they want money, neither of those things are available through services provided. People will often be very upset, and you will spend most of your call level-setting. -The company culture is terrible, it's like they don't know the definition of mental wellbeing. You will spend countless hours providing emotional support to people and giving them solid wellness resources, and then ComPsych's HR will send an email out to staff about staying "well" and them emails are generic and offensively simple. You will give out better resources than you'll get from upper management. - The turnover is impressively bad. If you're lucky enough to get hired while teams are fully staffed, just wait a month. When the queues are short staffed, call volumes increase and it's an unsustainable disaster. It seems like half the teams are in training, so no one is ever fully on the same page. -People will be verbally abusive during calls at times. You will be treated like absolute trash by clients calling in. They are often having really hard times and are, understandably, emotional. Because they might have had a bad experience with us in the past or think we're beneath them, they will make demands of you like you're their stupid butler. Clients will demand you do things that are impossible. - The physical toll of being at a desk 40 hours a week cannot be understated -The emotional and psychological toll of constantly deescalating suicidal and homicidal people is not to be taken lightly. We are providing this support over the phone, so we are extremely limited (can't see facial expressions or physically intervene). - There are almost no opportunities for growth, career development or moving up in the company. Training is partially proficient at best and coaching is a joke. -If you have a bachelor's and work as a Guidance Specialist and then earn your master's and become a Guidance Consultant, the job gets significantly worse, and you'll make pennies extra. I would compare it to a silent promotion, expectations increase but most other things stay the same. - The company had a team who leaves fake reviews on Glassdoor to make the company seem better to work for. I have this information from a former supervisor. -Managers (Team Leads) aren't allowed to serve as references, so you might as well not work for years because you have nothing to show for it. - The pay is TERRIBLE for the workload. Not only was it a lot of emotional work, there was a lot of technology you had to master, and things are always changing. After working full-time for more than two years, I went $3, 127.45 into debt because I wasn't making enough to cover basic expenses. -I asked for information on taking a leave of absence for mental health purposes and I didn't get a response from HR for three weeks. When I put in my official notice of separation from the company, HR emailed me back in 4 hours with detailed instructions. They don't care about the people who work for the company, they just care about filling empty positions. -The CEO gets students fed to him from a psychology program in Chicago so he can work them hard and pay them poorly, under the guise of education. -The productivity expectations are unrealistic and offensive to the client. Trainers tell you to try and get the calls done in 5-9 minutes. That means that you're charting someone's information, doing an intake assessment, providing emotional support, getting them a counseling referral and making sure they don't need anything else. Sometimes people are suicidal or just lost a family member, not a good time to rush someone through a call. - The new phone system (in my opinion) was designed to micromanage and watch employees. They told everyone it was to improve services for clients, but it's not done that, and Team Leads are grilling folks during monthly check ins. -It's REALLY hard to work in such an intense field and then constantly have the fear that you'll be terminated for not meeting productivity. -The CEO does everything possible to cut corners. He pays his staff terribly and also pays the counselor he contracts with offensively low rates. This negatively impacts quality of services provided, but the company is doing great so who cares, right? -The CEO owns property in Trump Tower, if that tells you anything helpful. -"Professional development" is a joke. They basically expect you already have all the skills needed when you take the job and just make sure you're sort of trained on company-specific issues. -You might not find out about major changes or updates until the day they're happening. There is a great divide between upper management everyone else, most everyone is not trusted with information until its being rolled out. You can imagine how things go while you're actively training on a live call. -I am POSITIVE I'm not thinking of everything, but hopefully that gives you a snapshot. Just please don't work for ComPsych. Its not worth your mental health, your physical health or the health of your career.