Stericycle reviews

-- Unfortunately due to missing SRCL stock earnings 3 quarters, Wall Street was very unforgiving taking the stock price from a high of $150 now down to under $80 a year hovering at 3 year low. - They say they care about the people but senior management actions of late have not been the case. Reductions in Force is happening all over. - Look at the turnover in the HR leadership role, the last Chief HR officer lasted only a year because he probably disagreed with the approach that Stericycle was taking using McKinsey!

AFTER READING OTHER REVIEWS - I would like to add that I can confirm what the drivers are reporting here on Glassdoor is true. Relentless dash/driver cam related nit picking, bad electronics, and bad customer service support are all to be expected, while often working more hours than you report and get paid for. I don't drive now, but I used to, and talk with drivers all the time. Some are looking around, and some are leaving for other companies for the same pay, but much better benefits and treatment. --------------------- Any comparison to the work environments and benefits of my other career minded peers leaves me sullen and angry. I have squandered years of my life trying to make a career with no recognition or visibility. Many companies of similar size have fast-track programs or performance incentives, recognition of their talent, and subsequently groom their capable and driven employees into management, but not at Stericycle. Stericycle has not seen organic growth in a long time. It grows by acquisitions now. In fact, you are more likely to get “let go” than promoted. Any and all promotions that I have seen have been because people left the company, or were let go because of budgets and really the promotion was just work redistribution to someone else with a cheaper salary. And during the last few years Stericycle has operated under a hiring freeze, while increasing workloads, forcing systems changeovers that are untested and cost precious time, all while forcing office personnel to go home at 40hrs and drivers to go home at 50hrs. There is no overtime allowed anymore. But they keep giving us more work without any feedback in the process, and you get in trouble when your work gets behind. When I was brought on five years ago, my boss then was telling me grand stories about how Stericycle promotes from within and raises high performers up to management and fast tracks them to corporate with great pay, and that I could have promising career like his in a few years. Well they got rid of that manager a few acquisitions ago, right when they installed some goofballs they got from the acquired companies that know nothing about our industry. When I started five years ago, about every quarter our regional safety manager would come around and hand out $30 gift cards to Target as kudos to team members, and if they caught you doing something right or going the extra mile when you didn't have to, you would get another $30 card. Then next year they switched to $20 Walmart gift cards, with no extra kudos for doing the right thing. The next year they stopped all together. There is no kudos program now, the last one was a ridiculous "high-five" program where someone recognizes you for something, then you get $5 Stericycle bucks that can only be used to buy Stericycle crap from their internal store with things like Stericycle logo-ed shirts, coffee mugs, and the like. If you're a driver you get your uniform and a jacket, but everybody else has to buy nicer apparel or logo-ed items out of pocket at full retail price. We get the occasional box of t-shirts that come in about every other year with some cheesy new initiatives, but it's just one shirt, and it looks like something from a volunteer day somewhere that after that day you only wear when you mow the lawn, not clean professional work attire. Also when I started five years ago, we had our Christmas party at Charleston’s Steak House with free drinks. I won a 37 inch flat screen TV that year too. Many people won digital cameras, nice GPS's, Kindles, etc. The next year we had to move down to Spaghetti Warehouse to save money, and we had a two drink maximum (boo-hoo, but whatever). I won a few random items like a car detailing kit, but it was still a fun time. The next year they cut our budgets and we have had pot lucks in the conference room ever since. We all buy the gifts out of pocket now and play dirty Santa with them. No alcohol allowed. I was even warned not to bring my own. Celebrating the holidays now costs us money. Stericycle is a great study in overconfidence. They have been an industry leader in many ways in the medical waste industry for quite a long time. And as they grew and grew, they started using acquisitions as brute force way to grow in customer base, capabilities, and overall revenue growth through cross-selling service within the medical waste services industry. Making acquisitions can be a healthy enough part of company growth, and can make a lot of sense, but a few years ago Stericycle got intoxicated by its leveraging and acquisition-al powers and really overstretched itself when it purchased both PSC and Shred-It. Because it had never really payed too close attention to its own health by learning from and solving the issues from other acquisitions, it now has created a fragmented layer cake of systems and services. They have dozens of different systems with legacy debt, patch-worked together with poorly designed and launched systems that intended to replace older ones, and these new-er systems are scheduled to be replaced by even newer systems within the next year. Because of these layers and layers of legacy debt and poorly designed systems, reconciling and accountability are near impossible. Add to this that Stericycle has routinely “reorganized” management to weed out those who are not drunk on corporate Kool-Aid. I trust my local manager for the most part, but every step above them for the next three layers is someone I deeply despise because they are disingenuous to interact with and have proved they are either incompetent or self-serving when dealing with real management issues. All the way up to corporate, I seriously have no one above my immediate manager to go to. The incentives are nonexistent. There are no performance based incentives whatsoever. The only carrot Stericycle uses is the hope of getting a 3% annual raise. If your performance is satisfactory, you will get a 3% bump in hourly pay. That’s it. I have discovered easily hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of unbilled orders, tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of customer fraud, hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of potential regulatory fines that we can avoid through making minor costless changes, all outside of my normal job duties. And for all this, the most I’ve seen in official recognition was my immediate manager at the time told me they would get me 3.5% annual raise (which they did), but that they would have to take that 0.5% from somebody else’s pay raise because we had a fixed budget! When our facility was surprise inspected by the Department Of Transportation, I hand-selected specific records to show them that I knew were in compliance, directly avoiding certain records that were not compliant. The inspectors were impressed and we passed with glowing praise. Afterwards, I met with my manager and pointed out years worth of files of non-compliant records, showing where we lucked out of getting fined and subsequently spurring a full regulatory audit. I showed where changes need to me made, how it needed to be done, and proposed ways to better design our workflows. What did I receive for this insight into our operations and saving us from a possibly huge ongoing investigation with certain financial penalties? Why I received both verbal praise and a brief mention on my annual written review. Don’t get me wrong, my manager did about all they could to recognize me, but that’s the point; this is all they can do. Also, no changes were made to operations and record keeping, so our records are a ticking time bomb. At this point I hope we get busted and fined. I would take pleasure in watching the company get in trouble for all the things I had been warning it about for years now. I get a little schadenfreude fix just thinking about it. How sad is that? The company doesn’t understand the industry, and that shows in its training (or really, lack thereof). In my position I get to see paperwork from all over the company, and it seems that almost no one actually understands how to fill it out, who gets which copies of what, or why certain things need to be documented. And these are federally regulated documents. The saddest part is that the managers are some of the worst offenders. And when you try to talk to anyone about doing things differently their eyes glaze over, and they say “that’s not what I was told” or “we’ve always done it this way”. Stericycle tried to have a giant two-day group training session a couple years ago, and almost every presenter had something wrong in their information, and some literally were saying to the class “I don’t know anything about this subject. I’ve never dealt with this. Do you guys know?” I even corrected some of the presenters, but they said to the class that I was mistaken and they would talk to me after the session. Every time I pulled up the regulations afterward, showed them where they were wrong, and got them to admit it. But it was too late; they already taught dozens of people the wrong things. As a matter of fact, I have only had one person read from the actual regulations when discussing regulations with me, and that person quit four years ago. Every single instance where someone has a question about regulations, they ask someone else or a group of people what they all think, never actually looking it up, as if group consensus means it’s correct. Let me tell you about all these systems. To start, Stericycle acquires a company that is using its own system, but wants it to switch over to a new system that Stericycle can use to track and bill out of more centrally. Make sense, right? Well the new system will be hacked together with little to no feedback from the acquired company as to what they need for their operations and to be compliant with regulations. And when they finally get their new program, they won’t get comprehensive training; they might send one person from their office to another to sit and watch for two days how they do it, then send them back home to teach everybody else. It’s like the telephone game, but with training. Then no one will want to use the new system they don’t know how to use, and they wind up using both the new and the old because they have to, and it take twice the time because they have to do twice the work. Also add to the mess that Stericycle’s new-ish systems are all centralized .NET Software as a Service, meaning it’s slow and not locally run. So every time your internet gets a little funny, you can’t work. One case I know about with a new program that is scheduled to come out this year, they called the facility out of the blue four years ago, asked for three people to get on speakerphone with them, and then just asked them all on the spot what features they would need in a new system. That was all the input they got in their new system they are being forced to use, and it was twenty minutes… four years ago. I know the current system I primarily work in was decided to be replaced about four years ago, and at that point they basically discontinued any upkeep in it. I have made lists of thoughtful changes that need to be made, many that would save some people 10hrs a week in labor, or would make us better compliant with regulations. But I have seen nothing. I have even tried for two years to get a single printer added to the system, nothing special, it’s just like the others; we just need one more added to the list. It’s set up and ready to go, plugged in with paper fed into it, all connected. They just need to add it to the system… for two years now. Also, they never –EVER- get you set up with the permissions you need to get to work in a new system. Sometimes it’s weeks or months before they respond to emails, if they respond at all. There's one system that for months I asked and asked for a profile so I could log in, I sent emails multiple times with no response. One day I was sitting in on a coworker's conference call with the person who I was emailing to get my profile set up, and I asked them when I was finally going to get it. They flippantly said I already had one, that I’ve had one set up for months. But no one had ever told me… for months! So I log in the way they told me and start using it, and I didn’t even have the basic permissions to use the system in the way they keep telling me I need to use it. This is the problem, Stericycle does this to everyone. They acquire, then ignore. Do you want to talk about safety? Well I have quite a few stories, but here's a simple one. I once watched a tech with 30+ years of experience pouring various acids into a 250 gallon tote, while only wearing a paper Tyvek suit, no hood, no splash guard, no respirator, and no eye protection (aside from his thin corrective lenses, which don't really count). He got acid splashed in his eyes and had to use the eye wash station for about 20 minutes to flush in out. Then he went and sat in the facility managers' office for about half an hour talking about it. Then he went right back to pouring up acids with no additional protective equipment, less than an hour later. There was no trip to the urgent care, no paperwork, no root-cause analysis, no report ...nothing. And he obviously didn't learn his lesson because he went right back to doing what he was doing before. There is no career here. You go to work to pay bills. This is a job. If you want to work your way up at Stericycle, go to another semi-related company and work your way up there, hope it starts failing from fraud and corruption, then wait for Stericycle to buy it up. You will be a Stericycle manager in no time. It would definitely be faster than if you started actually working here. And don’t sweat learning the industry or the regulations; Stericycle all but discourages it in its managers.