A very troubled company. - Mitarbeiter (anonym) bei HowNow: Mitarbeiterbewertung

Thank you for taking the time to leave a review. We’re not happy that your time at HowNow has been unsatisfactory and somewhere along the line, we did not meet your expectations. This is not the way we want anyone who joins the team to feel. We’ve taken time to reflect on your feedback: 1. Wind down Friday was a trial, it’s now been taken away. A perk specifically promoted in the interview process: As you’ve mentioned ‘Wind Down Fridays’ where team members get Friday afternoon off, was a 3-month trial. Following this, we’ve gathered data via survey to understand the impact of it on people’s productivity and well-being. As the feedback has been overwhelmingly positive, we’ll be shortly launching this as a permanent perk. One of our values is to experiment and learn. 2. To get ANYTHING done you must jump through unnecessary steps: We’re constantly trying to improve the way we do things so specific feedback about what you consider is “unnecessary” and why would be very helpful. 3. Job specs do not match the role: It would be very helpful if you can let us know which job specs so we can review them and ensure they set the right expectations. 4. You do more than one person’s job at any one time: As a startup, often people do have to take on more responsibility than at a large corporate, and we appreciate this is not for everyone and that our company was probably not the right fit for you. 5. Senior management never listens: We’re sorry you felt this way. Although we have introduced several initiatives to ensure our teammates are heard, we recognise as a young company there’s still more we can do. For example, we introduced bi-annual employee NPS, anonymised Q&A at our All Hands and fortnightly retrospective to ensure our people are heard. Their input has resulted in our best people initiatives such as the company retreat in Turkey, Wind Down Fridays, Monthly Lunches and Socials, Personal Learning Budgets, Birthdays Off and Flexible Working. We also collaboratively work with teams to mutually agree on quarterly targets to ensure they are realistic and not top-down. 6. Extremely high turnover, thus customers are passed down to an overworked team. Also lack long-term experience with a constantly changing team: Our employee turnover is under the industry average but we appreciate the point you are trying to make about the impact on the team. One of the learnings for us as we have scaled rapidly is to take more time when recruiting to ensure we find people who are the right fit and be clear in setting expectations during the recruitment process. When we've successfully done that, we have incredible people who are still with us after more than 3 years. 7. Distrust in employee sickness: I’m afraid we can’t agree with this comment. We trust our teammates by default and our management team makes it a point to go above and beyond to support team members when sick and/or going through a difficult time for any other reason. We would not keep anyone who we did not trust in our team. 8. Delayed salary payment: This is false. Since the day we hired our first member of the team many years ago till now, we have paid every month on the same specified day (28th) or earlier when that date falls on a weekend. 9. No record of payment to team pension contributions: As an employer, we automatically enrol every employee onto the People’s Pension Scheme and make contributions to your pension, and you can choose to opt-out. Everyone has access to their pension account to view the payment record. Recently it was flagged that there was a discrepancy, this was immediately investigated and the management provided the affected team member with an update on the reason for the issue and when it will be resolved by. 10. The senior management are like politicians, dodge serious concerns and practice the “if you can’t convince them, confuse them” method: Again, we’re sorry you felt this way. Please let us know if any of the responses above are confusing. We are happy to clarify. 11. Inappropriate prejudice behaviours: We have not received any such complaints but let me assure you we have zero tolerance for inappropriate prejudiced behaviour and take feedback related to such matters seriously. Please contact HR or a member of the Management Team to make a complaint so we can investigate. 12. Team members off for stress: We appreciate working in a startup has its pressures, and often we’re growing faster than we can hire. We’ve also seen the pandemic and the current economic uncertainty add to this stress. We’re addressing this by hiring good people fast to ease the workload whilst supporting people to find better work-life balance through better coaching and initiatives such as Wind Down Fridays.