Health Assured is a very difficult place to work. The workload is extremely high, and the staff turnover is even higher. The organisation claim they recruit every 2 weeks (or around this) because they are an ever-expanding company. The actuality is that they are haemorrhaging through staff. HA do not have any priority or interest in staff retention for employees who raise concerns. They are creating an echo chambers of their own successes, whilst others bear the brunt of their wrath.
You can see through all these reviews the common trends: micro-management, no care for staff wellbeing, and a bullying, toxic working environment. For an organisation who provide counselling and wellbeing support, the disparity between how they treat their client and how they treat their staff is astonishing. The fact that the majority of positive reviews come from current employees speaks volume. If former employees had the same or similar experiences to these reviews, we would not see such a dichotomy. The responses from Health Assured to the reviews on this page really does highlight the gaslighting culture that is prominent throughout the organisation. In response to employees raising concerns, they have been told to “not listen to the gossip”, because staff are obviously not capable of forming their own opinions based on their lived experiences and observations.
For an organisation that is BACP accredited, there are many ethical concerns of their inner workings:
1. Wellbeing support for employees is incredibly limited. Health Assured do provide a course of counselling for their staff, but they need to go through their managers to access this. Furthermore, employees are told that they have access to the in-house EAP helpline. The counsellors work on the helpline. This means that they are expected to receive support by their own colleagues if they were to call in. Additionally, all counsellors and management have access to notes, which is another conflict of interest.
2. The response to the pandemic was abysmal. Employees were not protected after the first lockdown and the bare minimum was put in place to keep us safe – for example, a limited amount of anti-bacterial wipes and hand gel stations were provided, staff were expected to bring their own; no protective barriers were installed for side-by-side workers; and when wearing face coverings became mandatory, no masks were provided, staff were expected to bring their own.
Staff were also expected to just carry on as normal and provide therapeutic services to the rest of the country, despite also living through this collective trauma. Again, for a wellbeing support organisation, the support for their clients far outweighed anything that was received by staff. Health Assured and the Peninsula Group frequently stated that they were following Government guidelines to ensure a safe environment for all. However, there was no room for flexibility within the organisation and at times, guidelines were heavily imposed without consideration for employee concerns and anxieties.
3. Health Assured boast a career pathway but then do not follow it for all staff members. There are some employees that have skipped past 3 job titles to fill a post as HA see fit, and others who have been held back for not meeting one of the many targets/goals they have been set. They have a particular position where counsellors are to train and buddy new starters, which sounds great on paper. In actuality, any counsellor, regardless of where they are on the pathway are expected to complete this role, without any of the benefits of the job title. Management explains this away by stating that “you are always working towards the next step up”. Yes, in some ways, but not as a permanent fixture when one has not even been granted the opportunity for a promotion.
4. Employees are given very little autonomy. Counsellors must adopt a Solution-Focused way of working, regardless of their therapeutic background. Employees are expected to work to multiple targets/goals, where the requirements and goal posts are frequently being moved. One of these goals is the call duration, which is constantly monitored on a day-to-day basis. The KPIs and SLAs are supposed to be worked on averages across a week, month, or quarter. Instead, managers monitor these on a daily basis, which creates a micro-management culture. Management are always questioning your work and your ability in order to keep everyone in line.
5. There is an opportunity to leave feedback, which they claim is “100% anonymous”. This is not the case, and a few managers have accidentally let that slip when enquiring as to why certain employees have not completed their feedback forms. Even if you do complete a feedback form, they may acknowledge that concerns have been raised, but ultimately, there is no response and changes are cherry-picked from a pool of responses. Due to the organisational culture, any concern or dissent is met with hostility. Personally, I tried every method to relay feedback to Health Assured, and all of these avenues were uncomfortable and dismissive.
6. Their drive for diversity and inclusion fell to a hard stop during the Black Lives Matter protests over the summer period. There was absolutely no response from Health Assured or the Peninsula Group to show solidarity to their employees. One email was sent out to the company, but this was written by a BAME employee and did not come from management. Health Assured have an inclusion group called Allied Pride which did not act during this period. There was no support for Pride month, which followed.
