Evolution at the Cost of Morale, Work/Life Balance, and Culture - Senior Applications Advisor/Applications Lead Nordic Consulting Partners Employee Review

I worked in Nordic’s Managed Services division for several years. As I mentioned earlier, Nordic is changing. A business’ ability to evolve over time is a vital component of maintaining healthy growth, but the last 12-24 months has seen an increased emphasis on fueling growth at the expense of morale, work/life balance, and culture. The addition of a former EY Partner as CEO and half a dozen or more former EY executives in key leadership positions has exacerbated the shift towards a more corporate culture, and the inherent dysfunction in divisions like Managed Services has only grown worse as a consequence of the pandemic and recent hiring decisions. In theory, the Managed Services division is geared towards long-term ownership of support and maintenance work at various client healthcare systems. A few clients go further and some teams work on projects and implementations, but the majority of the division is expected to work on tickets and other maintenance. While MS offers a unique growth opportunity for recent college graduates and career switchers through the Associate program, the bulk of the division is made up of former FTEs, consultants, and Epic IS/TS. As such, a fundamental flaw exists which fuels the dysfunction I mentioned earlier: the division can’t adequately staff contracts with the talent they need while maintaining a healthy profit margin. The inability to adequately staff contracts combined with market price pressure means analyst teams are expected to work multiple clients to increase margin. While working multiple clients is a fair expectation, the inability to properly staff contracts leads to a single analyst being split between two, three, or even four clients. It's not uncommon to see dubious assignments like 15% of your time to X client despite the fact the client demands half your week. The math simply doesn’t add up, and a lot of people, Senior Application Advisors and Application Leads in particular, end up working 50-55+ hour weeks to make up for the shortfall. Because of the staffing model, stress and anxiety are rampant. I know people who not only struggle with mental fatigue and burnout, but deal with stress-related physical symptoms too. Sadly, concerns and requests for additional assistance are often met with inaction or, if you’re lucky enough to have a Team Lead with escalation skills or a capacity for empathy, concerns are escalated to senior leadership only to be met with pushback, false promises, or apathy. I know several people even escalated concerns to HR but more than one Team Lead has told me requests to bring on more staff are being blocked by the C-Suite level. As well as fundamental issues in the staffing model, the compounding effect of the pandemic forced an increase in work typically outside the norm: overnight on call rotations for applications outside your own (holidays and weekends included), traditional consulting services contracts being staffed by MS resources, and additional weekend work to support go lives and other projects. I’ve seen Ambulatory teams working Inpatient on call rotations on Christmas and New Years, junior and mid-level analysts making 50k staffing surgery center implementations billed at hourly CS rates, and people being told, not asked, to work weekends to support clients not even engaged in formal contracts. The dysfunction and work imbalance I'm describing is bad enough by itself, but the stress is compounded by the way many of the Team Leads and Senior Team Leads behave and manage their teams. Nordic prefers to promote from within and a large number of TLs and STLs are former SAAs. However, the Delivery leadership group seem to prefer those who show a predilection for making decisions in the company's best interest. The division wants managers who can get their people to say yes more than they want empathetic leaders who will foster growth and wellbeing in their teams, so you often see those who are skilled at suppressing empathy and guilt becoming TLs before others. Given the preference for business-first people above all else, the quality of the Team Lead and Senior Team Lead group is wildly inconsistent. I've worked with some of the most talented and naturally gifted leaders I've ever met, but I've also worked with sycophants who don't care about their team and will agree to anything if it keeps them in leadership's good graces. I've seen TLs go weeks without 1:1s, TLs with only 6 people forget which clients their team members are on, and TLs with no client work sitting at their desks reading sports blogs while their team melts down around them. The inconsistency is destructive, and morale is in the toilet because there doesn't seem to be an effective system for monitoring TL performance and management skill. Feedback is given as part of the annual performance reviews, but bad leaders manage to stick around despite multiple years of poor feedback. As a result of the issues I've described and many others I can't mention because I would end up writing a book, Managed Services is losing top talent at an alarming rate. In the first few months of 2021 alone, at least 20 or more SAAs/AL/TLs have given notice and more are on their way out. To no one's surprise, those leaving are some of the best and brightest in the division. Leadership seems bewildered and don't know how to respond to the brain drain, and remaining staff are being asked to hang tough while they scramble to fill the gaps. Sadly, the division can't replace the talent they're losing because they can't afford it, and it's only a matter of time before client work suffers and escalations start piling up as a result.