Vantaggi
If you work on the Digi-Ops side of things you can structure your work/life balance amazingly and it can be a welcome relief to the normal 9-5:30. The work force is young and more understanding and human than most businesses. The shares are good - bonuses used to be more frequent, but have dried up from this year onwards. You can learn a lot about the industry if you’re prepared to do the extra work. You really can make a difference for some of the most vulnerable in our society as energy debt is so prevalent now and those that do the work via Credit teams etc really do change peoples lives when the customer works with us.
Svantaggi
If you’re on inbound calls for the remote team, it’s hell. Micro-managing, people checking on you - they say they don’t view stats as measure of the person but we all know it’s not the case. Each manager has different expectations for how many calls or emails per hour. The shares are great, but the opportunity to sell them is so far and few between like what’s the point in advertising them? Don’t bank on being able to sell ever to be honestly. Progression is awful - you get a measly pay rise adjustment for inflation. You have the ‘opportunity’ to earn up to £2k extra on your wage by ‘earning’ 4 skills points (specialisms). Sometime managers throw these out like they’re crumbs for the ducks, some hold them tight and hardly give out the opportunity for people. Plus you only get the pay rise after demonstrating you can take on a minimum of 16 hours a week of specialism duty! Development - there is an air of back-handed progression at times in the development and progression for individuals from Operation Managers/SLT. In my area for example, this has happened recently for a position that people wanted to apply for but it was done on the quiet for someone already targeted. You will work more hours than you are contracted for, you will work with people who put the bare-bones into their work ethic and routinely get away with it. Some of the work force is young - very young- for senior positions. There is a lot of naivety amongst those members of SLT which feeds into the general workforce. Performance reviews and reports basically don’t exist - you can be the hardest worker for a team but you’ll see people fly by on specialisms/boosting pay rises because their manager is more lenient on providing skills opportunities! If you are a top performer just hope you have a good manager who doesn’t hold you back because you make their overall team stats look good.