EMIS Group Reviews

I've seen some pretty remarkable things in this company. There’s a lot so I'll stick to what I deem to be the big stuff: Bullying: I've seen Incompetence, bullying and being generally underhanded become the mark of a successful person here. If a manager doesn't like someone, I've seen them simply make that persons work life so miserable that they are forced to leave. I've seen a team leader throw their own manager under the bus so they are forced to resign and then take their job. Nepotism: I've seen lots of nepotism. Preferential treatment is given to special friends and family members across most departments in this division (and by the looks of it, a number of other divisions too). I've heard about people failing interviews and then suddenly get in and rise to team leader once one of their friends got into an influential position. I've seen mates promote mates directly and I've seen bullying campaigns being launched on friends and family members' behalf. I've seen members of staff put in the effort and get mediocre scores in their appraisal while people who are mates with the director get great scores and land large bonuses as a result. I've seen good people bared down upon for minor infractions while the highly regarded get away with spending all day surfing the web or messing about on their phone. There was apparently an announcement of a big training budget but the only people who saw the benefit of that were the privileged few (the same few who are allowed to 'work' from home and get arbitrary promotions to new non-roles etc.). General culture: I've seen a single department have the highest staff turnover I've ever seen in any department anywhere because their members are so stressed by the utterly toxic culture of blame, KPIs and clock watching fostered by their director, they couldn't bear the thought of staying. So much good talent has gone to waste this way. I've seen people get made redundant and then I've seen the company try to trick them into accepting a 'trial' for role so they don't have the pay the redundancy pay. I've seen countless cases of people making an honest mistake, and then desperately claw for someone else to blame and throw under the bus for fear of being made miserable by their director. I've seen genuine cases of discrimination in this day and age and in a company of this size too numerous to go into individually (it was even pointed out in an anonymous company survey but nothing was ever done about it. No investigation. No change). I've seen sexual harassment cases get swept under the carpet with the victim being told to keep quiet about it in the office for fear of upsetting the perpetrator (who, at this point I’m sure you'll not be surprised to know is still here). To sum up: Want to know if someone's successful here? Find out how many colleagues they've made miserable or how much they have cost the company with their self-gratifying actions or look at who their mates are. Don't look at how hard they work or how good they are at what they do. I'd love to say that I'm an edge case, only seeing the worst of the company but after reading these other reviews, I'm saddened to see that I'm not. This is the rancid culture of EMIS Health.

EMIS Health used to be a fairly small, well focused company that did one thing and did it well with a good ethos, strong direction, and a high degree of customer engagement and co-operation. It has more recently gone down the “increase our presence” route and expanded into areas outside its traditional GP focused market. Whilst this has been great for the shareholders and investors, it has not gone down well for the way the company does it’s day-to-day work and the company is now beginning to pay the price for the poor implementation of that growth. Its products are lacking the quality that used to be the companies trademark with a delivery practice that seems to consist of get it to market and fix it later. There is a seeming desire to make it capable of doing everything and anything and letting the overall experience of using it suffer as a result. Whereas when speaking to customers they would be happy with a few less features if the core product was solid, reliable, and could be relied on to do its job without issues, EMIS seems to be more concerned on whether it can have the latest new thing or has exactly the same features their competitors have. There have been a lot of changes in the development teams that produce the software which has also contributed to a lot of the current issues in the company, most noticeably through a poor adopting of Agile practices (via 2 weeks training to make everyone agile…. but only the development teams… in a couple of the office…..) and a basic misunderstanding of what it entails (project managers that don’t actually get involved with the teams doing the work they just want progress updates, architecture done on the back of a beermat and never updated, happily accepting no customer involvement in design or feedback, no R+D on the impact introducing new features or architecture, etc.) There used to be a running joke that EMIS never sacked anyone. Whilst this is not a bad thing and employee loyalty is something every company strives for, this has also led to issues and “career” workers within the company. . It has helped foster the impression of promotion through “if your face fits” simply because of the length of time people have worked there. Conversely it has also led to promotions because of the time spent there rather than ability. This is apparent in certain areas where the “EMIS way of doing things” cannot now be challenged or changed. It has also caused problems in that now there is a belief that 3 years spent their equals X role, 5 years equals Y role and even poorly skilled or performing staff are expecting a promotion simply for sticking with the company. This has ultimately led to something of a brain-drain where those who can do and are ambitious eventually leave - the recent restructuring being a prime example of this. Working in healthcare has a pull that online gambling never will have but everyone still has to pay the mortgage.