I can personally confirm the trueness of all of the other 1 star reviews of Northside’s Molecular Diagnostics Lab. This review does not reflect any other department except the adjoining Flow Cytometry Lab only because their management overlapped with ours.
I will start by saying that so far no one has stayed in this lab for more than 3 years and there have been at least two mass exoduses in less than 4 years. Great track record, right? All of the other labs in our building are comprised of staff that have worked there many, MANY years. In the last 2-4 months FIVE people have quit. That’s over half of the molecular lab.
Have you seen The Handmaid’s Tale? Working there was like being a prisoner in Gilead where you couldn’t speak up or even walk around freely without being watched or reprimanded. This lab was absolutely run by fear, especially fear of retaliation. We were not able to voice our opinions on laboratory matters/operations without some kind of negative action against us whether by being assigned unfair lab opening/closing duties to the likes of verbal assaults. It was frowned upon if you were seen taking a water break in the break room instead of being chained in the lab slaving away and it was kept note of. The management would accuse employees of taking 2 hour lunch breaks in the break room when you were sitting right there with them knowing it was a blatant lie. When they tried to blame innocent people for something that went wrong in the lab and you tried to speak up to tell the truth then they would tell you that the conversation was over so that you were no longer allowed to further implement the truth of whatever situation it was.
Sexism is also an issue. It was more than clear that the management favored the men over the women. Men were always given more and/or first opportunities at the more complex or newest tests. Even if you were a woman who had clear experience on your resume with a brand new test/diagnostics that had not yet been validated by the molecular lab then you would not be included when it was implemented. Instead they would assign a male who had a single week of experience. Absolutely insulting. And if you were a woman who had a PhD (the same as the management has) then you would not be fully trusted and they would worry that you might be a threat.
Even though the lab was staffed by many former Emory and CDC employees (who had many years of experience) basic laboratory techniques such as pipetting would be questioned due to lack of the management’s understanding of troubleshooting for the given test/assay. We would not even be allowed to simply aliquot reagents without permission. We were treated as children and not allowed to think for ourselves. Another insult to our intelligence.
And as far as discrimination/ageism goes there was plenty of it. We all witnessed the management demean and try to fire an older, hardworking middle eastern person on 9/11 last year when they came back from a religious trip. You can’t even make this stuff up. Management approved their 2 week vacation time and also approved the extra day or two that they had to take due to a mishap on their travel coordinator’s part. Apparently this approval of the extra 1-2 days was a big no-no and the management held our next monthly lab meeting (while the employee was still on their trip) in the actual lab instead of the regular office area and called the employee a cheater, over-exaggerating that they took 3 weeks off without permission, blamed them for other’s mistakes that happened while said employee was gone and berated their character. We all knew if any of the other labs that we share a common office space with had heard that they would have been appalled, hence the secret meeting in the lab. Very unethical and unprofessional. And when this coworker went for help to HR and Employee Relations they did nothing except take the management’s side and nothing changed.
The management is also very well versed in setting up people to fail usually in order to cover their own faulty errors and reputation. If you speak up or disagree (or even do nothing at all in order to be on their you-know-what list) the management will look for ways to find fault with your performance. It’s sickening how ready they are to point the finger at someone else no matter how minor & frivolous the mistake might be. As stated before in other reviews there are a ridiculous amount of controls in place for a lot of the tests. I agree with the other reviewers that it seems to be a waste of money, resources and time.
Also, for the review that claims the management wrote a fraudulent review under their Glassdoor account, it’s 100% true. The management rarely ever came into the lab, much less to “check if the internet was working”. They were seen on that lab computer and they strategically & blatantly turned the computer monitor away to hide what they were doing. They were speaking so low you couldn’t tell if they were speaking English or their native language even inches away from them. Minutes later my coworker’s email notification showed a new review posted under her name and we all went and took phone pics of their browser history and everything matched up time-wise. From the browser history it also looked very much like they may have been hacking into the same coworker’s gmail account, but we cannot be sure. It was all very suspicious and obvious. They told Employee Relations that it was unintentional but we all knew they were lying, otherwise on their fraudulent review they would have listed their title as a management-type position instead of what they actually selected which was “Clinical Lab Scientist” that had only worked there for a couple of years on Glassdoor’s site. Pretty sure that’s considered fraud and false impersonation which are criminal activities. Their poor, unethical reputation is very well known by the other labs at Northside and even at many other hospitals outside of Northside.
