Unethical "Ethical" Company - Dispatch Operative Origin Coffee Employee Review

Great on paper. The team are passionate individuals driving great things against inherent challenges.

A Day in the Life- Origin Origin makes a huge number of sales. More and more every day. The sales team are at the helm, led by the CEO, who loves the chase. You make or sell the product, and you have to work harder with each new deal. Deals keep coming, and so does the complexity, and the workload. Managers come in to bring direction, but end up franticly project managing, as deadlines keep changing. They share concerns, but their feedback isnt listened to. Everything seems urgent, if the CEO thinks so. But he doesn't often say what he thinks until it's almost too late. A backlog of work piles up and the Manager has to hire new people to pick up the slack. Those new people come in specialised, but end up doing such a broad range of tasks, that they never really get to spend time doing what they're good at. The reactivity goes up, and the productivity goes down. The task seems endless. There's never a pause. All the while, new tasks are being added to workloads as the business makes huge, spontaneous growth decisions, which burns people out. When they finally leave, someone's hired in a slightly different role, with a slightly different remit, and can't pick up on the work of the person before them. So knowledge is lost with every new hire. Soon, the job becomes impossible to keep up with, no matter how hard you try. The overworked HR team fight to keep up with the pace of hiring. Spontaneous decisions, made behind closed doors, replace strategy. Theres inexperience and insecurity at the top, so the CEO ends up packing boxes to help. With no clear direction, and no effort to consult or trust the team, people stop working well together. The cycle continues, with budgets getting tighter and tighter as important projects fail to get off the ground in time. The first budgets to get cut are the ones that don't directly generate revenue. So people's welfare goes down, and company values slowly erode. Over time, this creates a toxic work culture where people feel disenfranchised and undervalued. Leaders then rely on threats to keep things going. Talented people run on dogged perseverance alone. Eventually, in the future, the company is sold for scrap by a leader who no longer wants to lead. The values almost gone. The people ready for change. Origin is no more.

- Excellent coffee and strong direct trade relationships with producers. - Talented, hardworking team that genuinely cares about their work. - Fast-growing company, offering exposure to change and evolving processes. - Several long-standing team members who provide stability.

- Lack of clear strategy from senior leadership, resulting in reactive work and constant priority shifts. - Major updates and performance information are rarely shared in advance, leaving teams to react on the day. - Very poor communication across the business; departments operate in silos with no effective systems to connect them. - Multiple office locations (London, Cornwall, Bristol, Edinburgh) add to communication and alignment challenges. - Senior leaders, including the founder, stay heavily involved in day-to-day detail, slowing progress and limiting trust in employees’ expertise. - HR does not consistently feel like an advocate for employees, reducing confidence in raising concerns. - Employee benefits have been significantly scaled back. - Roles are introduced without internal posting or context, creating confusion. In some cases, high-performing staff have been moved out of roles and replaced by external hires who were not the right fit and left within months. - Culture has weakened since investment, with financial targets taking priority over people and development. - B-Corp certification feels disconnected from actual strategy, often overridden by financial considerations. - Limited training and development opportunities.