Not sure if Twitter counts ads media but there is Media in Social Media.
Kind of shame to see current and ex staff arguing on the social meeds
Are there not policies in place that advise staff not to do this. My employer wouldn’t be happy if we did this and might even go down a disciplinary route for the staff involved.
edit… Need to read the trail
That is a tea without biscuits next week.
He doesn’t work for Monzo anymore so it won’t be
Just had a look - looks horrific!
Everyone got an 4 days off. COps can’t take theirs this year because the impact of COVID has resulted in a glut of untaken holidays by that side of the business, so unless they allow COps to just take off a whole month at a time, there was no simple way to address this. Admittedly they could have told everyone they can only have the extra 4 days in 2021 and that was that, but a decision was made, so there we go.
I’d hardly class the situation, or the Twitter discussion, “horrific”, though.
I read this very differently.
Broadly agree.
The unfortunate thing here is some staff taking to twitter to say how wonderful it is to have extra time off, while other teams are hard at it and unable to take their leave (and other people have been made redundant).
But that’s not really monzo’s fault. Giving people some extra leave is a nice touch.
One of the big differences is that many COps were furloughed. Although Covid caused more customers to need support due to financial difficulties, the huge downturn in transactions meant fewer COps were required for run of the mill “my transaction didn’t go through” type stuff.
All engineering departments are different, but some had to work very fast to implement the tech behind the government/FCA requirements for Covid support.
I read this very differently
The overall with the reviews is downwards - I’m not sure what there is to make of:
I have seen it described before as being “cultish” and that is right now more than ever. People genuinely feel scared to voice their opinions and go against the status-quo. Feedback to upper management is “not encouraged”. People are gotten rid of quickly, behind closed doors which adds to a culture of fear. It is essentially a cult.
and
Toxic culture (everyone is terrified of being sacked which brings out the worst in people). No respect for banking/regulatory experience. In fact lots of people threatened by it
and
There is a cult of personality around Tom B. Some staff genuinely adopt his mannerisms and catchphrases. His fears and anxieties trickle down. Tom once told a group of hundreds of people to wait until he had an epiphany when asked what our current strategy was.
and
The Financial Crime division is not fit for purpose. This is currently under review by the Financial Conduct Authority.
and
I witnessed many unacceptable behaviours working at Monzo. Examples include: citing an Asian candidate’s accent as a reason for rejection for a role, multiple occurrences of Black and Asian staff being labelled as ‘angry’ or ‘aggressive’ and being shut down, a person in the office doing an impression of ethnic minorities
and
saying that minority-people should accept that their lack of progression isn’t because they’re a minority or any bias but because they just might not be good enough and many more things.
All from different reviews.
I’m not quite sure I understand? I was saying that there was less work for COps? I’m making up numbers here, but for example - for every one person who needed help due to financial difficulties, there were five fewer people who needed help for transaction related problems.
Sorry, I was talking about the twitter thread. I didn’t realise you were talking about glassdoor. But I don’t rate it anyway.
Living with someone who has worked at the company for several years, I can safely say reading those excerpts is like reading about a different company.
That often happens - especially if you are from an ethnic minority - “Racism here? no!”
I am 100% not going to get into a conversation about whether or not a company is racist based on two anonymous anecdotal reviews. Neither of us have any evidence or experience with which to have a useful conversation on the matter, but given that I shall be erring on the side of “innocent until proven guilty” until any concrete evidence presents itself.
It’s not the Twitter comments about the timing of the extra 4 days of leave that concern me but some of the other comments in that Twitter from people who would know including:
Not being allowed to take leave or carry it forward so staff lose it;
Monzo not concentrating on fixing the root causes of fixing things that cause support requests; and
The inability to fix or change simple things because you need to involve more than one team to do so.
I thought employers had to allow holiday carry over
I don’t know about cases specific to Covid and furlough, and I am in a totally different sector, but use it or lose does not surprise me. I’ve worked through the pandemic and I need to take almost all of my my leave by October and will lose it at years end. That is actually stricter than normal this year as normally there are no rules around when to use it in the calendar year
Probably related to:
There is also an obligation on employers to ensure their workers take their statutory entitlement in any one year
but with the specific exemption:
Workers who have not taken all of their statutory annual leave entitlement due to COVID-19
This is how it works in any front-line customer support role.
Corporate gets days off, everyone else gets days in lieu.
This is a complete non-issue.
Use or lose it is not unusual as you say. However, the suggestion on Twitter is that employees had been blocked from taking leave by Monzo as it was too busy (which is an employers right) but then lost it as they were unable to take it or carry it forward - which is wrong… if it’s the employers decision to stop you taking it
I doubt it’s because there are suddenly more evil people in the company, it’s the fact that they are under such immense pressure to make revenue and cut costs that anything not related to making money has essentially gone out the window (e.g. the head and diversity and inclusion being placed on a redundancy list), furloughing staff, making staff redundant etc. etc.
As someone who’s work for tech start ups, I can only imagine the pressure cooker they are all in trying to keep monzo alive and generate enough revenue to attract investment or get to breakeven.
For customer support staff, they will always get the worst of everything because they’re often seen as nameless expendable costs, not engineers or executives.
As for the Glassdoor reviews, we’re seeing the same disturbing comments appearing in multiple posts that are getting a lot of upvotes. If a post has enough upvotes, I take it as more accurate and something a lot of staff agree with.