Pros
I have been fortunate to have had great TSMs. They have had to take the brunt of the complaints from dissatisfied MLSs and try to be understanding when they are (I assume) in the same position we are. The benefits are excellent but compatible with other companies of this size.
Cons
Worst company I have ever worked for in 20 years. I am a seasoned transcriptionist who was earning about an excellent salary until my company was acquired by Nuance. From there it just kept going downhill. I work on the highest percentage of ESL because I'm good at it and rarely have blanks. I most often have 99-100% accuracy and under 2% going to QA. They have consistently found ways to drop our pay and now I could go anywhere and earn more. Their method of pay is so complicated, they actually have a training session on it! In addition, their punitive consequences for errors is so severe, you could end up with minimum wage, seriously! While I agree that there should be a penalty for errors, their grading system is outrageous for what they pay us. I have lost up to $200 for a critical error or a couple of major errors (according to their grading system which is at times ridiculous) in one week. You must literally proofread every report entirely or type so slowly that your pay will drop anyway because you literally cannot take the chance. If you send more than 10% to QA, your pay drops to 7 cpl, doesn't matter that you may have had 100% accuracy in all reports audited! That 10% includes reports you are required by acct specifics to send to QA or if a report will automatically go to QA, i.e., if more than the maximum number of blanks allowed per the account for HIPAA reasons. Yes, you get penalized for those required by the company. That's part of your 10% so if you had 10.2% with those included and 100% accuracy for the week, you will get 7 cpl. Every time they say 'we are striving to ensure that our employees (not verbatim)' or 'we listened, we heard you (not verbatim),' I cringe because that means my pay is going down. I have lost over $10 an hour in the last 5 years with this company. In a recent email which said "in our ongoing efforts to improve" I lost 5 hours of PTO per year. That's right, they changed the way we get PTO and I lost again, not much, but 5 hours times a huge number of employees...... you figure it out. Why didn't it go the other way?? The employee never gains. This is how this company works. They pretend they are making it better for you but in truth we get less and they increase their bottom line. When the cost of living goes up, our pay goes down! Now, all that being said, if you can type or edit like a bat out of hell and never make a mistake AND have under 10% going to QA, you can make some serious money. I frankly can't see how anyone can do it, though, because if you are having a bad day and you make one critical error, one wrong number, or a couple of majors, you're screwed. Oh, don't let me forget training, you get $10 an hour, even if your calculated hourly pay is higher, you get $10. They have the worst training program. They give you a 1-2 hour online training session and then you're on your own. I will say it is better than it used to be, but they don't give you time to adjust; they start penalizing you the next day for any errors you make (not typos); there's no learning curve. So why do I stay? I'm too close to retirement to move. I don't want to start from scratch again, learning another platform, getting familiar with dictators, etc. My advice is to find a company run by people who have transcription experience and who value their employees. I had seen Nuance offering a $1000 sign-on bonus a while back to get people to apply (this may still be the case). If they were a good company to work for they wouldn't have to pay to get people to work for them. What they should do is take that $1000 x? and put it into finding ways to retain their employees. I won't even work overtime because I hate this company so much. I don't want to spend an extra minute working for them even if it benefits me.
