I've worked at Epic for over 5 years and have always had complaints about the company, but was willing to look past them until management's COVID-19 response. Overwork is something that's always been a problem, if you work here you will be given the workload of at least two employees and will have a task list that grows each day. This has become especially bad lately as sales and application growth continued but hiring flattened off, seemingly due to a desire to keep the company under 10,000 employees, regardless of the needs of the business. Additionally the handling of the pandemic and lack of flexible choices given to many have lead to tenured employees leaving or taking leaves of absence, further overloading already stressed employees. Often long hours, working weekends and late night emails are touted by those in management positions as examples of their dedication and you'll be automatically flagged if you work under 45 hours. Recovery time is given at a rate of 2-3 days worked to 1 off. So if you work 60-70 hours one week you'll be lucky to get one day off, and the culture and processes will subtly shame you for taking that time.
Many benefits at Epic follow this pattern, either being behind so many qualifiers or subtle hints that you should "feel bad about using it" that they only exist so Epic can say they have xyz benefits, but in reality they're basically unusable. In a customer facing role you will be pressured to sacrifice your free time and mental health to go constantly above and beyond or to make up for the lack of staff, but you will get nothing of the sort in return from the company if you need assistance. Epic touts that they care about their employees but their actions are directly contradictory of that.
Epic was extremely slow to allow remote work at the start of the Coronavirus pandemic, and when they finally did allow it, it came with not very subtle shaming that "leaders" were needed on campus, directly implying that if you chose to protect the safety of yourself and those around you by working from home, you were a bad employee. During this time petitions circulated to facilitate WFH and stop travel, and they were ignored by management until they got large enough and were then deleted. This pattern continued with multiple forms of feedback and employee communication being shut down and any sort of discussion silenced, culminating in multiple mid-level managers being demoted for speaking up against the return to work plan. Of course workplaces aren't a democracy, but this is especially upsetting as this whole time Epic has touted their culture of openness and feedback while taking actions directly opposite of that.
They claim they're making a data driven approach to bringing people back, but have shown us no data that indicates quality or productivity is slipping during WFH.
They claim they're working closely with local officials to ensure the plan is safe while looking for every loophole possible in public health orders to bring us back as soon as possible.
They claim employee health is their top priority but have made high risk employees go through lengthy and demeaning processes just to be able to work from home for a few more weeks.
Beyond the loss of trust and respect towards management from employees, it's ridiculous how much of this fiasco could have been prevented with a simple policy of "WFH until the end of the year, when we'll re-evaluate". Instead we've had the high salaried management group working for months putting out fires related to this, employees scrambling to make childcare plans due to late night weekend emails changing policy, millions of dollars spent splitting offices in half that no one will want to work in and now the company's reputation has been dragged through the mud in the national news. Ironically, the culture that management espouses in their WFW plan has become tainted and soured by their very actions to save it.
