System C reviews about "culture"

Gosh, where to begin. This company is a vulture that buys smaller companies and then devours them. They bought the company that I was working in and promised that nothing would change and then they would listen to us and take our thoughts, opinions and ideas into consideration before making any changes. What followed was a chaotic dismantling of everything that made the previous company successful. We had a good reputation, good ratings, strong processes, happy customers and employees. We were a company that people wanted to work for, and the average length of an employee's time was over 10 years. Many employees were there for 20 years. But System C came in and destroyed all the processes that worked so well and made us and our product so successful. Then they sprung a load of pointless layoffs (intending to scare the existing employees into submission). They got rid of some good, hard-working, talented employees and kept untalented people around. Of course, this led to a large chunk of the talented, senior developers leaving of their own free will. We all saw the writing on the wall. The level of stupid decisions made by the management was unbelievable. For example, we already had a dedicated and experienced testing team who knew the product inside out and were skilled at finding problems and reporting to us developers. Of course, the management decided that having talented people isn't good and decided to outsource the testing to a contracting company that hired incompetent testers from abroad, which ended up wasting countless hours of developer time to help them. I am so glad I left. The main catalyst for me leaving was how my fellow colleagues were treated during performance reviews. After the wave of layoffs, the remaining employees had to take up extra responsibilities without any extra pay. This was argued away as "we need to see how well you do with the responsibilities before we give you more money". We all thought that was fair enough. 6 months later, we had performance reviews and those who had gone above and beyond their jobs to take on extra responsibilities naturally gave themselves the highest rating, but the management decided they didn't like that and downgraded all those employees and we were told that we were being judged against our new responsibilities, rather than being judged as having taken on more responsibilities. This injustice against my fellow colleagues made things crystal clear for me. The company would just move the bar higher and higher everytime you took on more responsibilities in order to prevent people getting pay rises. This marked the end of my time with the company. This was the biggest kick in the teeth and frankly unacceptable. They also got rid of all the perks and socials that we had, claiming that "they were looking into it", after over 1 year, nothing has come of it. Lies, deception and terrible management. If you are considering this company, I have one thing to say to you: "Run fast, and run far". This company is not worth the stress. There also seems to be a culture of fear and intimidation within the company.

The are no cons so far.

As the business continues to grow, there are some challenges as we work to find our natural rhythm. We're all adapting to new systems and procedures, however this is a positive evolution that we’re experiencing together. While there is significant change and a constant busy vibe, I appreciate the variety and challenges. There's always something new to learn and opportunities for improvement, and I find that a good challenging environment to work in!

Salary does not reflect the responsibility and pressures of a customer facing workstream lead role on large multi million pound projects. I spent a very large proportion of my working life at System C, and am no doubt easy to identify, but I owe it to future staff to give my honest opinion and some kind of provable baseline on my old personal working conditions, although for others their conditions obviously may differ. I hope transparency is always welcome at System C. System C was a good employer prior to COVID, under the original founders, the McKesson Corporation and the Symphony Technology Group. Since then however a new private equity owner (CVC Capital Partners) has taken over and things have changed drastically and the atmosphere has become very cold. My average annual salary "rise" for last 5 years under the current ownership was under £1500 (2.76% per year), pre tax. Average bonus when paid (which was not every year) was under £1200 per year, pre tax. Extensive job cuts after acquisition of numerous smaller companies have made it very slow and difficult to do a deployment type job, as much knowledge and experience has been lost and overburdened staff have retreated from engagement with their colleagues. There is a current heavy emphasis on reaching billable hours targets. Resulting heavy focus on time recording damages interest in just doing your job. My old role was home based, although pre COVID I was working 2 to 3 days a week on hospital sites and in some cases staying in hotels away from home. Post COVID this switched to full time home working, as the NHS did not want people on site. Just before I left however, there was a switch in focus to pulling people back into offices, under the guise of "collaboration". A desk and parking space is bookable via a company app. Max employer pension contributions (Defined Contribution pension) for employees at my level was 8%, matched to employee contributions. Only 28 days holiday a year (including one for your birth month) after a very length service. Poor understanding by senior and middle management on what customer facing deployment staff do on a daily basis, causing friction and questioning/rejection of timesheets Often faced hostile senior level customer staff with minimal support. Helped successfully deploy over a dozen large EPR projects, however the last project took twice as long and the week after the successful GoLive, we had a Town Hall meeting. The senior leadership team offered absolutely no thanks to the deployment team for their hard work over those years. The only person who did was a HR person in the last few seconds of the call. When I left to retire, I received many very kind messages from deployment colleagues and customers, who personally contacted me and thanked me for all my help over the years. I received a cold standard letter from HR thanking me for my efforts but making no mention of my retirement, although the junior HR person who conducted my exit interview was very kind and thanked me on behalf of the company. Senior management said nothing on my retirement. Not one sent an email. Says is all really. It may work for you and it did for me for a while, but if (like myself), you are a quiet, capable, slightly unambitious person who just wants to do their job, then the current culture will be very difficult for you. I genuinely felt I was taken for granted and was being exploited by the time I decided to leave. Caveat emptor.

I have no cons here.

As someone who started completely fresh in the industry, I found that it took a while to understand the purpose and goals for the company, this message needs to be clearer, especially since there are so many freshly graduated people joining the company!

There are few people that I dislike enough to subject them to this horrific place. The culture was beyond toxic. It was unnecessarily stressful. Nepotism was rife and there were far too many senior managers who loved to talk and take no action. Leadership, if you can call it that, was totally haphazard and reactionary. Every single day was a constant challenge. If there was one thing they were excellent at, it was making the job far harder than it ever needed to be. Managers excelled at overcomplicating established tasks and processes to make them seem more important and justify their own positions. The SMT were full of their own self-importance and completely out of touch with reality. Staff morale was on the floor, yet just when you thought it couldn't get any worse, it did. The ability to keep acquiring previously successful businesses and completely annihilate them in record time was impressive in a way. They couldn't care less about the customers or the employees. There is no meritocracy in place and your skills, experience and knowledge are meaningless. We lost irreplaceable knowledge and experience at a titanic-like rate and yet absolutely nothing was done to patch the holes. When I left there was a distinct lack of sector experience throughout the delivery team and recent recruitments were clear evidence that nothing was being done to rectify that. Evidence has proven time and again that you cannot effectively implement medicines management projects (or any digital healthcare projects for that matter) without subject matter expertise. The lack of support and transition planning that was on display to myself and to other members of the team who had already left was appalling. Our former line manager (who left 3 months before me) was without a doubt the most supportive and incredible leader that I've had the pleasure to work for. Her replacement was completely incompetent and totally unqualified for the role. The senior management decision to appoint them into a medicines management leadership role without any medicines management experience was disgraceful. Confidence and morale in the delivery team was at an all-time low and there have been further resignations since I left. The team wasn't being adequately supported or led and I found myself having to provide line-manager duties to other members of the team because they were actively seeking them from somebody else. In 3 months the team went from the most highly-performing, results-driven team in the company to one which was rudderless, haphazard, chaotic and ill-equipped to run the programme. The SMT, and those they have inserted into inappropriate roles for the which they are entirely unqualified, have no interest in hearing the opinions of the experienced and knowledgeable staff who could actually stem the tide and start to rectify the mistakes that were made over the 18 months since the acquisition. It had become so common for people to ask staff for opinions or help but then completely disregard the responses, or in many cases just to answer their own question. Internal comms was abysmal. Nobody believed in the strategy and goals that were being communicated. As a business we should have been customer-focused, ensuring that we delivered software that improved patient safety and helped clinicians and ancillary staff to deliver healthcare more effectively and efficiently. JAC was superb at this; it's one of the key reasons I left the NHS to join them. They respected their customers and were rewarded with incredibly high customer retention rates and customer satisfaction scores. This feeling has been completely eradicated. I have kept in touch with some customers since I left and have been told that "it's never been worse". Staff are very quick to notice when you don't practice what you preach. The words become meaningless if you consistently undermine them. We were told in December 2023 that benefits would be "harmonised" by 1st April 2023 for staff on legacy contracts. As April came and went there was no update on this topic, but never-ending updates on pointless 10,000 step challenges that real people couldn't care less about. They thought that this would humanise the senior managers and help improve the culture, but the reality was that it just alienated the average worker. One year after the restructure started, and still we had no private health insurance or life assurance. How much can the SMT really care about health and wellbeing when they reduced the paid sick leave policy from 3 months to 2 weeks (they did reverse that decision after receiving a huge backlash from staff). Perhaps they should have tried to support staff who were mentally scarred from the horrendously handled restructuring that they were unnecessarily put through. Perhaps they should have delivered on the promises that were made around benefits. Instead they treated staff and customers like an inconvenience and an afterthought. Updating the expenses policy to prevent staff from buying lunch or beverages whilst working away was the polar opposite of supporting our health and wellbeing. They actively prevented us from staying health whilst carrying out our remote role responsibilities. I regularly worked 4+ hours away from home for 2-3 days at a time, often having to fly to my customer sites. How they expected me to managed without expensing lunches and drinks during the day is beyond me. They were so out of touch and uncaring that it became laughable. I felt an enormous sense of pride and belonging at JAC/WellSky. It was like a second home. I consider many of those JAC colleagues to be genuine friends. We all believed in what we were doing, and we supported each other both in work and outside of it. I felt absolutely zero association with System C and am delighted to have left.

-Lack of clear communication can sometimes result in missed opportunities for career advancement