Held Hostage by Organized Labor - Anonymous employee Commonwealth Health Employee Review

People here worked very hard, but were constantly under the gun financially with few if any resources to apply to improving clinical quality, patient satisfaction, building a world-class culture, or hiring the best and brightest. There are at least five collective bargaining units and they play mean, old school smash-mouth games that result in HR management being so burdened with avoiding legal problems that there is little gas left in the engine to do anything productive like develop talent, create a strategic staffing plan that weeds out the nurses who have been there too long and stopped caring, or create an amazing patient experience. Management was so preoccupied with counting paper clips and making sure the payroll never carried so much as the smallest fraction of extra FTE expense that they lost sight of important matters such as employee engagement, patient satisfaction, and innovation. Great leaders were impossible to retain because they were never given a context in which to truly do amazing things. When the main focus is on FTE counts and supply expenses great leaders get bored and frustrated. They then leave because they want to be on a winning team, not one that lives in fear of the corporate office and will not invest in organizational development and culture.