I was with the company for nearly two years and it was a great place to work until Lata Menon became the new CEO and she started hiring all of her friends into higher level positions. She started nitpicking all of the people who had been working there for years, even the people who were ideal employees, and it seemed like being buddy-buddy with her was the only way you could keep your job. I was being paid to do a job, not be her friend.
I truly loved that job more than any job I've ever had and was very passionate about helping people. The first time she met me, I was leaving and she was coming in and I had no idea who she was, but instead of an introduction she asked me immediately "you never smile, do you like your job here?" She thinks you have to perform for her. It's not about helping people anymore, it's about helping Lata now.
Even though she is supposedly a licensed therapist, she couldn't grasp basic concepts like boundaries.
Not only did our work environment change because of her micromanaging presence and her friends that conveniently became our managers, but if you criticized anything that she and her cronies did, you became a target.
Before Lata took over, we were allowed to hang up on people who were harassing callers. People would call in and masturbate, they would call in and cuss us out they would call in just to tie up the lines and they would say things like "I'm not suicidal, I don't care if I'm tying up the line, I hope those losers die."
But when she came onboard, we were no longer allowed to hang up on people who were purposely tying up the lines. I tried to express my feelings over the issue after watching someone who had been at the company for nearly 5 years get fired for refusing to answer a harassing call.
I tried to express that what she was doing was enabling people with mental illness to harass us, and it was taking away from the integrity of the line. She didn't seem to care. I told her that I hope she wasn't just keeping us on calls to bolster our numbers and get State funding, and she didn't have much to say after that, but she did tell me that she thought I lost empathy for people and had me "retrained" as punishment.
They fired the black guy, retrained the white girl and offered to take the white guy off the line.
In the months since I left, I have known two other people who were there for multiple years who are now gone as well.
The only people who were not chased out are the people who are fake and two-faced with Lata. The people who will smile at her face and talk about how fake and empty she is behind her back.
There are no genuine connections being made at First Choice anymore. Everything is a production for Lata's entertainment. The numbers went up substantially and she was able to open a lot more hotlines. They moved us to a cheaper building, gave us more lines to handle and no pay raise.
It's a real shame. Like full stop, they should be ashamed of themselves for turning something so beautiful into something so toxic.
