An actual accurate and honest review - Anonymous employee OLIO Employee Review

Hi, this is Tessa (OLIO’s co-founder & CEO for those of you reading this who aren’t from OLIO). I’m absolutely devastated by this review. I’d really appreciate it if you could book some time with me during my Founders 15 (time Saasha and I set aside for anyone in the company to chat with us 1:1 every Friday). Or if you prefer, please do reach out to Thaisa, our People & Culture Director. It sounds like you’re extremely unhappy and life is far too short and precious to not be enjoying your job, so I’d love to do what I can to help get this resolved! In the meantime, here’s a response to some of your points: Perhaps it hasn’t been clear to you (that’s on me), but from launch to now we’ve been firmly in ‘experimentation’ mode as an early stage startup that’s trying to do something really tricky (change consumer behaviour). That means that we’ve been building product with a view to seeing what does and doesn’t move our North Star Metric (# listings coming onto the app). Inevitably some experiments have worked; others haven’t. As we enter the next stage of our growth which is all about focus, we’ll be stripping things out of the product that don’t work. This isn’t a failure, but rather a healthy thing to ensure our product doesn’t just ‘bloat’. We do have a backlog; a very extensive one, so I’m really surprised you don’t know about it! I’ll talk to the product & tech leaders to see what we can do to ensure everyone is aware of the backlog, in a way that’s useful As part of growing our tech team from ~10 people to on our way to 30+ people over the past 12 months we’ve promoted a couple of our existing team members; and we have recruited new leadership talent that has experience of this stage of growth. I’m very sorry to hear that you think one/some of our internal hires have been over promoted. We do a bi-annual 360 performance review process for everyone, so if you haven’t been able to give feedback prior to that, I’d strongly encourage you to use this as a vehicle for that. We haven’t yet developed a clear career progression framework, but that’s next on the list for our brand new People & Culture team, once they’ve implemented our new HR Information System, and Applicant Tracking System which are our current pain points. They will be starting to develop a career development framework with the Tech team first. To help people reach their career goals (whatever they might be), every person at OLIO has a Personal Development Plan (PDP) which they create the first time they go through our bi-annual performance review process, and you’re responsible for updating it at each review thereafter. This helps us support people in reaching their career aspirations. If you haven’t got a PDP, please reach out to your manager. We do have a very diverse team, and in our tech team in particular. We’re absolutely thrilled by this as ‘inclusive’ is our #1 company value so it's something we work hard at (although of course we can always be better). You mention team mates with anxiety in particular, and that was one of the main reasons we recently rolled out the Inside Out service to everyone in the company which provides access to 1:1 counselling and also helpful tutorial materials too. We’ve also kickstarted some D&I training that’s available to everyone in the company. As far as I’m aware we have *never* forced someone to attend an event, or take part in sessions if they let us know it would be uncomfortable for them. In fact I personally know of several instances in the past when someone has chatted to us about not wanting to attend, and they haven’t, and that’s been absolutely fine. We try to ensure that in-person events work as well as possible for all sorts of people, (including accommodating those who want to opt out of optional activities) although this is of course still a learning curve, and something we will get better at with more feedback and more experience. For all of our events which we record we share in advance that recordings will take place, ask the team for their permission allowing people to opt out, and also ask again that everyone is comfortable before publishing the final version. We are very supportive of anyone who wishes to opt out (either from the start, or after filming has taken place). If you feel that you’ve not had the opportunity to say this please do let me or your SLT member know. As we’ve been on a massive recruitment drive recently, and we know how important Glassdoor is, we absolutely have asked the team to leave a review if they would like (mentioned on the company call; followed up with an email to all). There was nothing untoward about this, especially as Glassdoor is anonymous so there’s no way to know who has and hasn’t left a review anyway. I could be wrong, but I suspect that those who have left a review may feel upset by your suggestion that they did so under duress, or that what they wrote isn’t true :( As part of my induction that I do with everyone who joins OLIO, I spend some time on one slide in particular which is all about the importance of speaking your mind, and healthy debate/conflict. I’m sorry to hear that you don’t feel this is the case. I will raise this (again) in our SLT meeting on Monday. With regards to the map view as part of the Supporter package, that was deliberately an MVP approach, and (as we suspected) we have found that OLIOers become Supporters because they support our mission first and foremost, rather than for the map view. Our conversion rates to Supporter are bang on industry average and through the rest of the year we will be continuing to improve this. This is another example of where it seems like perhaps you’re not familiar with the strategy behind why we’re doing some things in product - we have the AMA feature where you can direct a question to me/Saasha/any SLT member, and I’d strongly encourage you to use that to get the answers to these sorts of questions if you’re not sure why we’re doing something. Or of course, please do ask your line manager too! I am *extremely* concerned to hear you say that you feel micro-managed and belittled. This is absolutely NOT what we want, and isn’t at all in keeping with our #3 company value which is ‘caring’. I would strongly encourage you to please speak to your line manager, the line manager of whoever is treating you this way, our People & Culture team or myself to get this resolved right away. I would also hope that you have tried to give this person some feedback as in my experience, people can often be shocked and unaware of the impact their behaviour is having on others. But if they aren’t told, they will never know Finally, if you haven’t already, please can you make sure to give this feedback in the Employee Satisfaction Survey which is currently out with everybody? We run this 2x per year and it’s a really important channel for us to get feedback about things that can be better, and hopefully there you can give a few more specifics so we can solve the root cause of some of these issues. Thanks!