Businessolver Reviews

• Internal HR – Businessolver is an HR nightmare. Vacation time is very weak, starting out at 10 days of total PTO for the year. You don’t earn any additional vacation time until you have been employed for 5 years. There is no compensation structure in place. They will hire incoming employees at whatever it takes to get them in the door and then leave them at that salary until they complain. There are no standard annual raises. If you’re passive and are not comfortable asking for a raise, you will likely never receive one. The biggest problem with the compensation structure is the inconsistency of it. There are people in the same role making anywhere from $40,000 to $80,000. A lot of employees put in their notice to start a new job and are then talked into staying at the company by a large raise and often some extra vacation time. In addition to the compensation and time off issues, there are a lot of connected hires that take place (husband/wife combos, siblings, friends, etc.). This contributes to a major clique problem and an unstoppable gossip chain. • Workload – As mentioned before, Businessolver is a sink or swim company. If you let on that you can take more work (or in some cases even when you don’t), you will receive more work. If you’re not careful, you can get buried and end up working 50-60 hour weeks. A lot of smart, hard-working people have fallen into this trap and been forced to leave the company because they can’t handle the stress. I would recommend being very open with your manager and set realistic expectations about your workload to avoid getting to this place. Most leaders are in the same boat as you and will hopefully go to bat for you to keep your work/life balance at a reasonable level. • Open Enrollment – Open Enrollment is a killer in the benefits industry, which is no different at Businessolver. However, during Open Enrollment is when the “creative chaos” turns into unorganized madness. During open enrollment, the workload ramps up significantly and causes a high amount of turnover. When someone on your team leaves, the work tends to roll downhill and often sets up others to fail. During open enrollment, this is multiplied by 10. To make things worse (and unbearable), Businessolver is against the idea of hiring temporary employees to answer phone calls during peak times. To address the staffing issue, all employees are required to hop on the phones and take calls from employees who are enrolling in benefits. Helping on the phones wouldn’t be a big deal if all client services level employees weren’t already drowning in their own work and working a lot of overtime hours. To leadership’s credit, even the CEO hops on the phones and takes calls to handle the absurd queue times. • Meetings – Businessolver has far too many meetings for employees who are so busy. They promote the idea of being a “meeting slayer” and running a “lean” company. It doesn’t fit that model when the entire company is at a halt every day in Stand Up. Every team is required to attend a meeting from 8:15 to 9:00 every morning. From 8:15 to 8:30, you meet with your “circle” within your team to go over daily workload and capacity issues. From 8:30 to 9:00, the full team comes together to read a PowerPoint created by Rae (the CEO’s wife and the VP of the company). It typically surrounds a concept she saw on a trendy business blog or in a Ted Talks video. No one finds any value in it, it’s a complete waste of time and delays your day from truly starting until 9:15 when things have settled. Also, system and client facing employees are generally on all client calls together, which is beneficial for the client, but a waste of resources. Equip your client facing team to be able to handle technical questions. • Instability – Over my time at Businessolver the company changed its model multiple times. Roughly every year in the first quarter, the organizational chart is reviewed and completely changed. This could cause you to entirely change teams, switch clients, switch bosses, etc. There is no time where you are going to be able to have any sense of stability. In my few years, there are I had a double-digit number of bosses. Most of them were changed due to the company organization, a few left for greener pastures. In a normal company, you will typically have the same boss for a long period so your strengths can be recognized and you can develop your skills. At Businessolver, you are constantly reinventing and reproving yourself to your new teams. • Turnover – A common theme throughout my review and others on this site is the turnover. Businessolver tenure isn’t good. They like to promote their low turnover to their clients and incoming employees, it’s simply not true. If you last more than 2 years, you will likely not work with anyone you started with anymore. It’s a huge problem internally because the workload shifts and buries other employees. But it is also a big problem for clients. Clients frequently go through team changes from people quitting or the yearly reshuffle of the company. It is very detrimental for clients because they see it as a revolving door. Once they get comfortable with their client team, it changes and they must retrain their new team to adjust to their company’s style. • Contract – All employees are forced to sign a non-compete contract upon starting with the company. The contract lists that you can’t leave to go to specific companies in the industry as Businessolver deems them “direct competitors.” These include Mercer, BSWIFT, and Benefitfocus to name a few. Due to this stipulation in the contract, employees who are leaving the company often don’t reveal where they will be going. The contract is written that the list of companies can be updated at any time. There are additional pieces to it like not being able to talk badly about Businessolver for 1 year after leaving the company, you cannot actively recruit current Businessolver employees, and then other standard contract pieces.

Today is 3/30/17. We were asked to write a review in response to a negative review written here on 3/23/ by a Denver associate.We were told to only come and write positive things. So...Im positive that telling your employees to only write positive reviews isn't the right way to fix negative review. Im positive that the negative reviews are in fact accurate. Im positive that leadership is out of touch with the reality of the situation. Im positive that this is not the kind of company people should want to work for.