Pros
Working in healthcare and helping patients can be rewarding. You get to teach yourself a lot about the German employment laws.
Cons
During my years at this company, I watched many members of the team who are not in core leadership develop burn out. The constant barrage of the phrase 'we are a family' is used to push staff to work more and more unpaid overtime while giving them an unmanageable workload. Leadership would contact staff who were signed off sick from work by a doctor to see if they could continue to work from home. I saw a head of team scream at a member of staff in front of the whole open space office. Staff outside of the core leadership are underpaid compared to the rest of the start up market. Bonuses are only for the sales team and they change the bonus system at least once a year and increase the targets month on month to even more difficult levels. The HR department is not equipped to deal with visa processes, work-place accommodations and do not have some of the basic process in place for staff returning to work after sickness, how to deal with in-house bullying and even hygiene and safety issues. The sales team does not receive timely performance reviews, and the career path for how staff could receive promotion was changed over 5 times in the space of 2 years. We were told that no one in the company could take a vacation during January every year, except a staff member in the core leadership team was able to take a 2 week vacation during this time. We were told that all staff could only take off the 24th or 31st December, yet the CEO and COO had both off. COO would often say he could hire replacement staff on even lower salaries. Sales teams are on shift work and this has been between the hours of 8am and Midnight. Monday through to Saturday. These shifts changed every week for you, so its difficult to maintain a decent balance and sleep. The company once a year has a company wide anonymous feedback form for staff to fill in, which they say the CEO and HR reviews before sending your individual feedback. Discriminatory and bullying reviews were often left in and further increased the toxic atmosphere. Management often took off time in the week without using vacation or a sick day to be fit for their weekend and would openly brag about it in the office. Dismissal of staff under the pretence of performance happened several times without any previous warnings or a performance improvement plan. If you are dismissed from the company, they show little care to send the necessary forms to the job centre on time so that you may receive benefits. During the pandemic, there were huge problems with KUG. Often the payment was miscalculated and you would receive less than you should, which would eventually be paid months later and your payslips for those months changed. Many staff on KUG were told to look for other jobs because they had no work to come back to, rather than going through the dismissal process.
