Pros
There are many things about Touchstone that are positive. First and most important is time to document and complete tasks is very good here. Touchstone does a very good job at allowing us the freedom to create our schedules and block out time needed for billing. Touchstone is not like many other community mental health services. They place more of their funding into time saving devices, training, and members services than most. Touchstone has a very good healthcare model that brings in professional experience from all areas behavioral health and wraps around services to fit a members needs. For employees who have a lot of experience and need little supervision, Touchstone should be a good place to go.
Cons
Unfortunately these positives do not reflect the actual experience of working at Touchstone. The amount of time wasted on proving how good you are is quite honestly a big hit to motivation. Every week employees are expected to evaluate and rate their production. This is a good practice except Touchstone Supervisors do not communicate well together and as such, referrals and client needs are not provided to employees at an expectable rate to provide enough clients for staff to work with. What this does is cause most employees to be below the requirement for billable hours and fail their weekly evaluations. This then disqualifies them from the incentive program that employees receive for doing all work on time. Management relies to heavily on the input of only a few to decide what regulations and policies an entire department must adhere to. There are things that go on that does not seem to be discussed beforehand and simply are the new standard. Retaliation for expressing concern about a productivity repremand that resulted from lack of clients being assigned to staff, is very high. Questioning a decision will quickly result in a black smear being placed on you that all supervisors instantly change their tone on how you appear as an employee. Things you once thought were positive attributes recognized by supervisors get turned into negative aspects of your employee reviews. Supervisors are not monitored and are given very large amount of authority with very little checks and balances to keep them from abuse of power. What may be the biggest con when considering employment with Touchstone, is the new policies in regards to hourly employees. You no longer have a secure 8 hours a day 5 days a week pay rate. Your work schedule relies on being provided enough clients to fill your hours. Should supervisors not provide you with enough clients to fill a day, you may find yourself with only 10 hours worth of billable time. The new policy states employees must have scheduled time to justify being on the clock, otherwise they will get written up. That means your hours can go as low as 20 for a week if you do not have visits. On paper Touchstone looks like a good place to work. They have a killer Financial incentive for reaching billable goals in a timely manner. They pay at a competitive rate, and they have extremely beneficial programs that help members. Unfortunately they hired to many people with no system set in place for putting them to work. Instead of figuring out how to provide the employees with work, they devised a system that allowed them to not pay those employees until they can give them more work.