Cult-Like Environment, Toxic IT Culture and Horrible Leadership! - Anonymous employee ChenMed Employee Review

This is to inform any candidate who is looking to join this company and wants to know what they’re signing up for….please do not make the same mistake I did. Let me start off by saying to please be very careful with some of these reviews, specifically the ones that were written in 2018. ChenMed ran a campaign called #lovewhatyoudo last year and asked all its employees to post positive reviews on Glassdoor to increase their review ratings. You will see reviewers calling them out on it so be very careful with the average review rating you see on this company. It should be far less than what is showing. You will also notice the most recent reviews have a different tone and are probably more accurate description of what you will encounter. Next, I’d like to point out the company’s overall culture. I would describe it as cult-like and very prescriptive. The company requires you to recite the “CHENMED WAY” every morning and in the beginning of every meeting which can feel like you’re being brainwashed. Specifically in IT, they now require employees to recite it by memory and will chose a random person to recite it during the morning standup in front of everyone! In addition, they will recite and discuss 1 of the 21 Service Standards and 1 of the 13 Values and Behaviors. Reciting it every day wears on you and the message loses its meaning after repeating it so much but this is the way that they believe it will be ingrained into their employees. ChenMed is a privately owned organization ran by the Chen family. The Chens are very religious and have a strong Christian belief that permeates across the organization. They will organize devotionals where they will speak about God and the Bible and will ask employees to hold hands and pray. This is a very important point as this culture might not be for everyone and will make some people very uncomfortable as it did to me. They don’t advertise the religious part of the organization until you’re hired. Side Note: After doing some research on why ChenMed uses this approach, I found out that Horst Schulze (co-founder of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel Group) is on the board of ChenMed. This is important because if you research the Ritz-Carlton culture, ChenMed is using a copycat approach of what Horst created at Ritz-Carlton. The only difference is that ChenMed has way more Service Standards, Values and Behaviors and they also added their religious beliefs/material into the mix which I believe is their downfall as not everyone has the same beliefs. ChenMed will never be the Ritz-Carlton of healthcare for the elderly with this mindset! Not everyone wants to be educated on religion while they work…that’s why we have churches to go to when we chose to! Moving on to the IT organization. I can definitely say that the employees you work with here are great, work very hard and are willing to help you. The problem “lies” within the IT leadership. The CIO, Hernando Celada, has a micromanagement style approach in running the entire department and does not trust anyone including his Director leadership group. He needs to part of every decision including having the last word on every candidate who gets hired into the department, which I appreciated at first until he vetoed a unanimous decision on a candidate because he thinks he knows people better than anyone else….he doesn’t! Let me say that I personally witnessed people who he decided to hire, against the recommendation of his leadership, and either left the organization shortly after or were fired because they were not a good fit. He also has promoted and put people in charge that he previously worked with in the past. Now, normally I wouldn’t have an issue with this if they were well qualified but most people who are in a Director position in IT have no reason being there. Some of them went from being Engineers to Directors in a matter of months. Some of these people have never managed anyone in their life and it clearly shows. They all have a strong loyalty to the CIO and will do everything and anything to make sure they please him including lying to their employees which I’ve seen. The CIO uses a fearful tactic to get things done and will blame others so he avoids confrontation. One example I personally witnessed was when the CIO lied about why the company took away P-Cards (credit cards given to employees to use for company approved purchases) and blamed it on the CFO saying that it was a decision to control cost and swore the company wasn’t in financial trouble. The reality was that the CIO was not happy with some of the purchases that were being made by IT employees but wasn’t man enough to confront his department with the true reason and hid behind a lie. This is not a person who is a true leader! Be honest and truthful! Lying to your employees and thinking they are less intelligent than you is a bad decision. The work environment in IT is very demanding and there is no work-life balance. You’re expected to work as much overtime as necessary including weekends to get the job done with no comp days to allow for downtime. Projects are not well organized and people are constantly getting pulled in multiple directions without any priority. You’re constantly on the edge of your seat and fearful that if you don’t comply with their work culture or not working hard enough you will be fired! There is a very fine line that you have to walk and you are not able to deviate from that. If you speak up against ideas or people you will be met with retaliation. The culture is not one of being honest with your peers and/or leadership. The culture doesn’t allow you to resolve differences or disagreements with each other. If someone in a higher level position feels that you disagree with them and they will immediately go to your boss behind your back as opposed to trying to resolve it like adults with each other. The overall company still has a very mom and pop feel to it as there are employees that will threaten you to go to the Chens if they don’t get what they want which is very petty. It’s like saying “I’m going to tell your mom because you’re not giving me what I want”. This has caused employees not to speak up or say anything which has stifled great ideas and allowed problems to persist. ChenMed has a high attrition rate somewhere between 20-25% which is a lot! This tells you either they’re recruiting practices are flawed or they’re lying and not being truthful to candidates who are joining the company and its causing people to leave the organization or get fired because they don’t believe in their “CHENMED WAY”. I hope this gives you some idea of the work culture and work environment you will be subjected to if you’re considering joining this company, especially in IT. This is definitely an organization that is not for everyone and is very telling by seeing how many people have been fired or left the organization during the time I was there. Even entire departments have had multiple turn overs where the longest tenure is only 6 months!