Pros
I found my immediate managers to be exceptionally supportive and hard-working during my tenure there. Many employees were exceptional, efficient workers, too. There was a family atmosphere and rapport with co-workers. I learned a significant amount working here, especially about the importance of data/statistics in operations.
Cons
The CEO of the company is, as uncomfortable as it is to say, quite clearly an egomaniac. His arrogance stems from his success with an outdated business model that no longer is consistent with the SSDI industry. Senior Leadership was working to remedy that during my tenure, but they did so in a way that was tone-deaf and at odds with the emotional employee perspective. Most of my interactions in middle management with Senior Leadership were positive, however. I found them to be hard-working good people operating in good faith, misunderstood from an employee level, and working with a problematic CEO and industry. As a middle manager, probably the most difficult thing was the relentless negativity from an essentially traumatized workforce. As an employee, you spend all day getting berated by clients who do not understand Allsup's role, the SSDI process, and who are in difficult positions themselves, of which they often project to the employee. From an employee perspective, all you want to do is help them, but too often you are met with condescension or worse. Add on to that, you often have a heavy burden of work to complete. From that, as a manager it becomes difficult to help employees realize that there are positive things that occur. We had several spurts were our backlog would decrease, & the burden of work reduced, lucrative incentives offered, etc. but negativity would persist. Incentive programs were met with chagrin, actually. Reasonable attempts to increase productivity were scoffed at. Highly paid Consultants would spend half their day gossiping about how bad their job was ( while getting paid to gossip). The positive, even-keeled folks were silenced and employees who were negative attracted much attention and were contagious almost. If you are a manager with a vision of improving employee experience and quality of work, it is hard not to get beaten down by an employee base that seems not understand the necessity of change in an industry that is completely different than before, is constantly critical and does not recognize your good-faith, and who have elementary, inflated notions of how much influence & control a middle manager has.
