Pros
Despite the many concerns I have with Centene, there are many good people who work there. These people mainly exist at the rank and file and first line supervisor levels of the company. It appears that one has to internalize the mean culture of Centene in order to advance to the rank of manager or above.
Cons
My manager was a bully who engaged in the following unprofessional behavior: • Notorious micromanager who reveled in tightly controlling the work of their subordinates. • Lacked the ability to interact with others in a normal manner. Often yelled and belittled people instead of respectfully making their point. Unwilling to complement employees when deserved. • Played favorites with employees. Favored employees were allowed to openly break the rules and perform at such a low level that they were effectively rendered incompetent. • Did not consistently hold employees accountable for quality of work. For instance, one employee kept track of user acceptance testing issues by scribbling them on post it notes that were shoved into a desk drawer. These issues should have been recorded in a tool such as Excel or SharePoint. • Berated employees for not completing an impossibly large amount of work in a very short timeframe. Did not listen to explanations on why this timeframe was insufficient. This was often used as an excuse to discipline employees. • Made up and changed rules on the fly in order to fabricate reasons to discipline employees. Other concerns with Centene outside of my management include: The cliquish coworkers ostracize those who are not friends with them and exclude them from work related conversations and meetings. One coworker in another department developed the habit of not communicating with me directly when contacted with work related items. They preferred instead to communicate indirectly through another coworker who happened to be their friend. The team that my group interacted with most frequently was impossible to deal with due to their rude behavior. One person on that team falsely told me that they could physically visit my team’s workspace to discuss work items, but that we weren’t allowed to visit their workspace. They even refused to tell me where their team worked at. I never received the proper systems accesses to fully perform my job. Nobody even seemed to know all of the necessary accesses for my position. There should have been a list of the accesses needed for each role. My department technically had SharePoint, but it was unusable due to not being set up properly. Nobody knew who to contact to set it up properly. Other teams had functioning SharePoint sites, but they were unwilling to help us. The turnover in my department was astonishing. The department had 23 employees and I only know of three who were in the department for 3 or more years, but there may have been two or three others. Centene has an obnoxious requirement that male employees at the corporate headquarters in Clayton, MO (St. Louis area) wear ties as part of the corporate formal dress code at headquarters. This only applies to Clayton and does not apply to the rest of the St. Louis area or elsewhere in the country. The tie requirement needs to be removed.
