This place turned toxic fast - Anonymous employee Health-E Commerce Employee Review

1.0
Apr 4, 2021
Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

-Discount on their website fsastor.com -High employer match for FSA and HSA accounts. But when you think about it, you'll probably spend all your FSA funds on their websites so you don't lose it and they're getting back the money they had given you in the match plus your own contribution.

Cons

This place turned toxic fast. All of this was set in motion before the pandemic. It’s just a coincidence that a lot happened during 2020 (the year of Covid). I was happy here until they hired a lot of toxic people. I’m writing this review out of deep concerns about the increasing lack of professionalism and just straight up meanness that I experienced. The overall theme is senior employees act like you’re wasting their time. A lot of this happened in a span of less than 6 months. --The company underwent a massive reorganization. A lot of teams were laid off and replaced. THIS COMPANY DOES NOT PAY OUT UNUSED PTO. --Senior HR folks are useless even when you just need practical help. The company switched payroll providers and I couldn’t edit some fields on a state tax form through the online portal. HR outright treated me like I was an idiot and said I didn’t have to fill out the form if it didn’t apply to me. I DID NEED to update those items so the correct taxes could be deducted from my paycheck! I’m not contacting you to be difficult. I needed you to help me. The HR person I contacted ignored me for days until I followed up again. They just handed me off to a junior HR member, who was more helpful with investigating the problem. --During an online happy hour, another HR person made me feel unwelcome. They didn’t realize I was in the chat room and happily declared it an “HR party.” When they realized, the best save they could come up with was “...and someone else is here, too.” No attempt to pronounce my name, which was shown in the participants list. They didn’t even ask how to say my name. There were only 5 people in the chat, so It’s not like there wasn’t an opportunity. I guess they thought I hadn’t heard because my camera was off, but I heard and I bounced from that happy hour. --I witnessed a new VP make a joke about “hazing” a new employee in a Microsoft Teams group chat. The recipient of this joke was in the chat and I don’t know if they were ok with it, but I was not not comfortable witnessing this. I couldn’t even leave the chat because it was created for a training course we were all taking. The best I could do was mute the conversation so I didn’t have to get any more notifications from the group. --The new senior employees that were hired are just really disorganized. They’re supposed to be leaders. They would create projects that left out critical elements. They also constantly changed their minds and changed project requirements even after I had started working on or had completed their requests. I can’t do my job if they’re not prepared or are constantly changing expectations. I was really afraid I would look bad even though it was them who were the problem. --What made things worse was how the company adopted this “pick a deadline and stick with it” attitude. Sounds good in theory, but it’s very bad if the project was badly scoped. So there would be a lot of time when more working hours were actually needed, but the deadline wouldn’t be moved. --A new senior employee made unprofessional comments about me and management disappointed me with how they handled it. This employee admitted in writing that they had frozen me out and refused to answer my followup questions because they thought I was “questioning the request.” This employee even forgot what the website looked like and in the same breath accused me of completing the request wrong. I complained and excuses were made for this employee. I was told this employee was actually a very good worker, this was a busy time, and they were just trying to make sure deadlines were met. They were not good to me! I don't know what was going on with that employee, but it wasn't ok to take out any of their anger on me. There was no talk about how this employee’s actions were bad and if they would even be spoken to about it. This employee was preventing me from doing my job by refusing to answer my valid questions. Their flippant remarks about me being insubordinate and incompetent were harmful. I was afraid to complete anymore request for this person since they were very quick to anger. They were causing interdepartmental problems because we are not in the same department and I don’t even report to them. I was expecting at least management would speak to this person. It’s not like I was expecting a formal write up of that employee. After I gave more evidence that this person was a problem, then management agreed to speak to this employee: this person was constantly changing their requests and it was not the first time they had forgotten what the website looked like and gave me incorrect directives to "change things back." I should not have needed to give more evidence. The inappropriate comments should have been enough. This incident really showed me how much I was valued at this company: I was not valued.

Explore other reviews about Health-E Commerce

5.0
Jun 24, 2024
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

The offsite are amazing, the work life balance is nice, summer fridays, good leadership!

Cons

Not many that I could think of

4.0
Dec 1, 2025
Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

remote work that feels like you're in a room with adults. however, there are a few too many "thought leaders" in the over bloated exec team which make priorities and ownership confusing. they have an amazing competitive advantage with insurance partnerships, but it felt as if there were too many cooks in the kitchen at times which made work take longer than it needed to with far too many rounds of revisions/approvals.

Cons

empower individuals to truly own their lanes. snuff out people that are all talk and no action. learn from poor investments - create more narrow strategy and execute. certain teams and managers unfortunately can be/feel cliquey. some teams will assign blame to others/point the finger across the aisle vs. take accountability. can feel a little "style over substance" with flashy off sites, remote perks, strong HR presence when behind the scenes they are PE owned and will make layoffs and tough decisions when margins and profits aren't where they were projected to be.

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