Corporate Greed, Hierarchy, Employee Stifling - Wellness Specialist Life Extension Employee Review

Life Extension’s wellness specialist (as well as customer support) structure is an almost comical depiction of corporate greed. Wellness Specialists are expected to be on call nearly 24/7, under constant supervision, with little ability to use personal talents or creativity to “rise up” the ladder and experience career growth. Unfortunately, even those who have chosen to perfectly bootlick and follow the rules are also purposefully stifled in their growth, specifically compensation-wise. This is because the structure is designed to avoid giving employees meaningful raises. Raises are based on documented performance reviews. And performance reviews are based on a certain set of metrics that are extremely hard to accurately quantify, intentionally vague enough to easily justify how nearly no employees ever score excellently. There are a set of easily identifiable flaws in calls, but what is considered optimal is left up to interpretation, so that even if the main goals of a call are accomplished with no flaws, there’s always some abstract hypothetical way to have been better, which means that there is a reason for your review to cut you short in terms of grading. And if you were to go above and beyond, chances are high you would not have enough allotted time to actually succeed in implementing this effort, and get points docked off your call for speaking too long. This is extremely beneficial to Life Extension, whose internal systems are so specific and standardized (micromanaged) that they can chronically underpay even very high performers, and very easily replace them with another desperate individual who is passionate about health/science and knows how to read a script and follow instructions. If you are coming here out of an interest for knowledge, a small wage, and nothing else, it can work for a time. But your professional creativity, ambition and growth will be stifled, unless you are exceptional at sucking up to your supervisors. For two employees who make the same number of mistakes on their calls, the relationship between them and reviewers/supervisors/management makes all the difference in their career growth here.