Avoid this sinking ship - Anonymous employee Sage Employee Review

1.0
Sep 5, 2018
Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

FTSE 100 company (may not be a case soon). Good benefits if you manage to get them. Would say great people but all my colleagues already resigned.

Cons

Avoid this company, It is NOT worth it. Sage is not a technology company. Imagine used car salesman trying to break into “cloud business”. This is the mentality and work culture in Sage. The products are one of the big weaknesses. Sage has no true cloud products. Rebranding desktop products as “cloud” and charging more is not a strategy. Using support teams to push sales does not make sense. Your customers paid extra for the support not for talking to salespeople. Truly toxic culture. Bullying and harassment. Senior leaders with a history of verbal and emotional harassment are still in the business. HR is helpless when you bring those issues to them. They will advise you to drop it in fear of retaliation from the leaders. Old boys club. It is difficult to understand how the company is performing. CFO is bragging to investors about having a good quarter when in fact the business did not hit the target. Constant employee churn on every level. CEO being fired, CMO left, CIO left, CPO left, many VPs and MDs left (50+). The company went through five managing directors in the UK over the last two years. Some teams disappeared completely, when every member left. Sage has one of the lowest rankings on Glassdoor for the “tech” company. There are good reasons why: Unfair. Every six months employees are subject to “bell curve” reviews. Every team has to find 20% members who ‘underperformed’. You may achieve all your personal goals and objectives but will be deemed as ‘underperforming’ by your manager. Managers have to meet the quota. 
 Won’t pay your contractual bonus. CFO didn’t like the mid-year results and unilaterally decided that Sage won’t pay any bonus for that period. The company didn’t pay bonuses in the last two years. The years when the bonuses were paid, you will get usually a fraction of the bonus anyway. The payout will be tied out to your bell curve rating, company performance, country performance etc. Dishonest. Do not believe positive reviews on the glass door. Sage employees are incentivised to post positive reviews for perks. Do not believe Sage HR response on the Glass Door either. Despite what HR claims on Glassdoor, there has been a hiring freeze. This was recently confirmed in public by Sage CMO during one of all hands meetings.
 Greedy. Just google independent review of Sage CEO and CFO salary pay. It is the highest in the industry while the business is not achieving its targets. Independent watchdog PIRC criticised Sage. Constant cuts. No technology investment, travel freeze (18 months in a row), training freeze, no team outings or team lunches. Everything is being cut except CEO and CFO compensation. 
 Chaotic. Sage calls themselves matrix type organisation, but this is far from the truth. What you get is organisational chaos, multiple people doing the same job and teams with overlapping responsibilities. It results in the inability to agree on anything, missing deadlines and stressful work environment. Nepotism. Senior managers prefer to hire colleagues from previous companies. If you are offered a job do your research on LinkedIn around the prospective boss and the new team. Extremely Slow. It takes weeks/months to get a company laptop or mobile phone. New people are hired but can't do any work in the first weeks. Sage fails to procure a laptop for them. It takes weeks to get access to employees portal or to access your payslips online. No scope for growth. No progression or career path. You were hired to do one job only, and that’s it. No strategy, all that matters are this week sales targets. JFDI mentality among management.

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Sage Response
7y
Thanks for reviewing us. Sage is a high performance focused organization, and change is constant. This kind of fast paced environment is not for everybody, but for most of our colleagues, they embrace the path of strong growth and transformation. Recently, Sage needed to make improvement to our business and streamline our processes to drive our performance – this resulted in a number of colleagues leaving the business. Although it is never easy, those colleagues will always be part of the Sage family and we ensured they left in a respectful and compassionate manner. Although we cannot publicly discuss the process, you can be assured that we the value of “do the right thing” in mind. To clarify a couple of aspects of your review. Stephen Kelly has stepped down as a director and CEO. He will remain available to the Group until he leaves on 31st May 2019. Our CPO has not left, Amanda has been interim CPO for about a year now. Our CIO has also not left the business, we had an interim CIO, now we have a permanent one. Our CMO left Sage 18 months ago, and Ron was interim and made permanent last month. We are proud of current and former colleagues; it makes us feel immensely proud when former employees go onto enhance their careers. We never ask for positive reviews, I am happy to share with you the email I send out asking for reviews - here's a quote from the email - "we want ratings to be a true reflection of life at Sage." - Glassdoor recommends we ask people for reviews, so there's nothing different here to what other companies do. We categorically do not have a hiring freeze. Take a look at sage.com/careers...as of today over 130 jobs live and that's excluding France, Germany, Switzerland, Belgium, Australia, Malaysia and Singapore. There also is not a travel ban. All we are doing, like any business, is being prudent with our money.

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Cons

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2.0
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Pros

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Cons

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