Epic Systems

The work is challenging and meaningful. I feel valued and well compensated.

Leadership is arrogant and refuses to even acknowledge that they might be wrong. This has been displayed most recently with their handling of COVID, because they refuse to acknowledge that we can be successful working from home in a pinch. Therefore, they are going to be requiring us to return to the office despite public health authorities encouraging businesses to allow work from home.

They've been putting their efforts into silencing employees rather than trying to address our concerns in a respectful manner. "Authoritarian" is perhaps a strong word here, but there's no denying the similarities in how internal dialogue is being handled right now and how free speech is handled in authoritarian states.

Management does not do a good job at load balancing work, so folks who have a history of success but aren't good at negotiating their workload will often end up with too much work.

1. Exceptional circumstances call for exceptional measures. I would expect any break from publicly available public health guidance to be accompanied by strong data and evidence that the risk of breaking with that guidance outweighs the (societal) cost of aligning with it.

As a healthcare IT company, it is not unreasonable to say that our productivity affects public health, but you can't just assert that public health guidelines shouldn't apply to your operations and expect your employees to trust that you have done a good job at weighing the pros and cons.

1. Consider that employee happiness is important. When you do something that you expect employees might have a negative reaction to, ask yourself, "Is it worth it?" The cost of your employees losing trust in you might just outweigh the benefit you get from whatever "fair" policy it is that you're implementing.

2. If you want your employees to trust you, then you first need to trust them. When you demonstrate a lack of trust in employees, you lose their trust and respect, and when you lose respect, you will start to see less cooperation.

Recognize also that with 10,000 employees, not everyone is going to behave appropriately. Punishing everyone for the actions of a few is a great way to start forming an adversarial relationship with your employees.

1. Place a higher value on experience. Healthcare and IT are both complex. You really can't be successful without tenured employees, and bringing in knowledge from outside the company might also help us form new and innovative ideas.

2. Improve consistency of management. Team leads should be working on load balancing across the team and working with team members to figure out what needs to shift around and what can shift around. I don't think that happens consistently across the board.