Plusnet reviews about "career progression"

Unfortunately, this is where things take a turn for the worse. I will be breaking this section down into multiple parts Lack of progression opportunities One of the things that struck me and instilled a sense of confidence early on in training with Plusnet was the visit from one of the HR managers. With Plusnet being part of the wider BT/Consumer group, something that took me by surprise was the statement from the HR manager telling us that all PlusNet management and progression opportunities are in house, and that it is a rule of thumb that all management and more senior members of staff going forward are to have worked their way up from Advisor level and will have to be from Plusnet themselves, not external or BT. Unfortunately, it seems that this is not the case. As one of the people from the first team at the Doncaster site, me and my colleagues are generally considered tenured, with nearing two years experience in the role. It’s safe to say that we all are good at what we do and are also more experienced and have a generally deeper understanding of our job. As the site began to fill out with the introduction of new teams, the cracks started to show. The statement that was made about all management consisting of Advisors who had worked their way up was unfortunately proven untrue, as there are now four teams (not including mine) that have managers that are not from Plusnet. Only one singular manager in the entire Doncaster site (from the original team) has been able to progress their career at Plusnet into a management position, the rest have essentially gamed the system and here is how. Plusnet management positions in the Doncaster site have been taken by those who worked on the BT management side of the business and have essentially moved sideways into management positions at Plusnet. One of the major issues with this is that there is a severe lack of knowledge and understanding (all of which are essential to provide your team members appropriate support with their roles) as they are unfamiliar with the Plusnet operating model and systems that we use. For example, one member of staff who is a manager and was from BT (but has also recently been standing in as the business sector manager for Doncaster whilst the actual business manager has been away) was sat next to me one day whilst being introduced to us all, and I was given the responsibility of giving this member of staff a crash course in our workflow and the systems that we use. This member of staff didn’t start their career at Plusnet and had to work their way up, they moved in sideways and filled a position that someone with experience and tenure in their role could have worked towards. There isn’t a particularly positive sentiment around this member of staff, as they are notorious for offloading their managerial duties onto other members of staff such as taking escalation calls from dissatisfied customers (I surmise this is due to them feeling out of their depth with the expectations the role asks of them). The story is the same for the other three members of staff that moved sideways to Plusnet without any experience in company. One of the biggest injustices in regards to progression at the Doncaster site was an agent who had worked for Plusnet in the Sheffield site for over a decade and had transferred to help coach some of the new teams. This member of staff knew the faults and technical workflows like nobody else onsite, and was planning on progressing further with this on a more permanent basis. The member of staff in question, who is held in extremely high regard by all those those that have had the pleasure of interacting with them, had their career progression stopped in their tracks for no valid reason and was to be brought back down to advisor level, a total insult to their skillset and contributions to the company that they had contributed greatly to for over a decade. This created a widespread sense of outrage in centre as this was clearly the wrong decision for management to make. This is one of the most tenured, knowledgable, approachable and thoroughly decent members of staff in company, and this is how they were treated. This member of staff has now transitioned into a non faults based role as that was the better alternative to being put back on the inbound phone line; a clear waste of their talent and knowledge. This links into the general treatment of the employees that I will go into more detail about further along. There is no morally justifiable explanation as to why progression opportunities are being blocked from tenured advisors and are being handed out to BT management who have no knowledge or understanding of the job. I cannot emphasise this enough: Progression is not based on competency or tenure. It is based on the practices of sycophancy and nepotism. It has gotten to the point where people have been put onto the career development path and have dropped out due to the clique culture that management engage in. Management Culture/Behaviour/Accountability/Policy One of the main issues with working at Advisor level is the lack of direction and management. Managers are scarcely available to provide support or answer urgent queries that often come up with irate customers requesting escalations of their complaints or requests that we must make to management because of the operating procedure we have to follow. Management are rarely at their desks with their teams, available to help. The typical reasons why boil down to two factors: The seemingly endless amounts of meetings they are attending and the excessive amount of smoke breaks the managers take (usually all in a group, so multiple teams are left without any member of staff to support them whatsoever). Management don’t have to adhere to any sort of monitoring system that ties in with their daily schedule, and their workflow is fairly freeform. As such, there is no actual way to guarantee that a manager will be on the floor to assist or fulfil some of the things that advisors have to request of them as part of procedure (more on this later). Management at Plusnet (when not absent/unavailable) are not concerned on being “people managers” but “number managers”. By this I mean that their primary concerns are not the well-being of their staff, but that targets are met and that conformance to the monitoring system and timekeeping are within the fine parameters that the business expects. Management initially appear to be invested in you; the individual, however this goes out of the window the moment there is anything even slightly amiss. For example, if a member of staff goes ten seconds over a break, this is rounded up on the monitoring system to a minute and is then marked as “lost time” that management are regularly sent reports on. Advisors have been taken into conduct meetings about things as small as this on numerous occasions and this practice still continues to this day. I have no issues with a company wanting to monitor and ensure the productivity of it’s employees, but the only time that I have ever seen any of the monitoring data used has been against employees for the smallest perceivable transgressions. The Communication Workers Union recently has surveyed staff about the times that employees are logging in and out of systems as workers are expected to have all their systems that are needed for their role, loaded up and ready to go by the time shift starts. This usually means for about 15 minutes or so before the actual shift starts, employees come in and then are expected to log on so they can immediately start taking calls at the start of the shift. Keep in mind, this is unpaid time that is being given to the company, yet should you dare to be thirty seconds over on your break, there will be trouble. If there is someone that dares to suggest an improved way or working, or that process is failing some of our most vulnerable customers, expect to be taken into a “HR Meeting, Record of discussion or fact-find investigation”. Systems regularly do not work for the employee and fail the customers yet there is no consideration of these factors when the stats aren’t quite as high as management want. The long story short is, if you speak out - management want you gone. You will have a target painted on your back and they will to their utmost to in essence; constructively dismiss you. Systems/Policy (Extended) One of the main points of criticism is the “Knowledge System” that is mandatory for advisors to use on every single call, to the letter. This system is called Albert, which is somewhat ironic due to the lack of thought this system has put into it. Albert for lack of a better word is a flowchart. One that you click through step by step on each call to help service the customer and answer any queries that the customer may have on the call. This sounds fine on paper, however the system will often give the wrong advice, have information missing or worst of all, crash. Albert is a work in progress system and is not a complete and reliable resource of information. Any suggestions or requests for support are usually dismissed with the usual “Follow Albert” or “What does Albert say?” rhetoric that management attempt to drill into the workforce. Any feedback for the Albert system is handled with the feedback tool, where feedback about issues with the system, incorrect information, lack of information etc, are nearly never acted upon and responded to, despite the volumes of feedback that they get on processes that are failing some of the most vulnerable parts of the customer base. Conformance to using the Albert system is monitored and if the data doesn’t show that you are following this system to the letter, this is viewed as a conduct issue, even if you are doing what is best for the customer. One of the main issues is that the system is wholly unreliable and as a result, so is the conformance reporting data. Albert regularly fails to save your progress and the flow that you have gone down, so there is often no record of the agent even using it. This mitigation is not considered by management, and any perceived conformance issues are deal with harshly as a conduct issue against the employee. The advice from meetings involving the “conformance” issue is that if you cannot get these issues resolved by management, the advisor can take it further by contacting more senior members of staff. Again, great advice if the advisor wasn’t then taken into another meeting for “Ignoring the chain of command”, giving the advisor little recourse in getting issues like this fixed. The phone system has a number of statuses that the agent will put themselves into to log what they are doing on a given day. This is usually made to match the schedule and the advisor must place themselves into the correct status on the phone system to ensure that they are confirming to their workflow. The issue with this is that advisors are expected to log in before their shift even begins, so they are able to click into the “Ready” status as soon as the shift officially starts so they can take calls. This usually results in about 15 minutes of time before shift where we are interacting with the systems getting everything ready. The CWU is investigating this as unpaid work. The same also goes for breaks. You are allocated an hours total unpaid break for the entire day. Typically you end up being back at your desk five minutes prior coming off of your break so you are able to click off of the “Break” status and onto the “Ready” status to begin taking calls again on time. This has to be done on the dot otherwise the reporting system will show you as “out of adherence” and will record this as lost time for the business. The same lack of flexibility also applies to the absence policy. Even if an agent has a condition that is covered under the Equality act, there is no understanding or consideration of this as a mitigation, and absence warnings will still be regularly issued. The absence review meetings are quite formal and a series of mandatory questions are to be asked of the advisor. The most infamous one is “Is there anything you think you could have done to prevent this absence?”. As you can imagine, especially in the cases of bereavement this is a wholly inappropriate question to ask of the employee and makes it evident that the business is not remotely interested in the wellbeing of the employee, but the impact on the business. Appealing an absence warning is nearly always futile, even if due to something covered under the Equality act. There are members of staff who haven’t had time off sick for years, and have become so ill in recent times they have had no other choice but to take time off, and have still been issued warnings. This only gets worse when you take into account that advisors are expected to stay behind shift and take a call if one comes through at closing time. This is not in and of itself a problem, but claiming your unpaid time back is not a process that is explained or even once discussed with employees and is often extremely difficult to have actioned. This results in more unpaid work. You’re expected to give all your time, but receive little to nothing in return, not even a modicum of understanding if you so much as dare to fall ill or have the misfortune of a bereavement. The company wants 100%, 100% of the time but is wholly unwilling to give back.

The free food has been known to make people ill on countless occasions. I personally found mouldy cheese and mouldy bread buns there more than a few times, grey/spoiled ham and all kinds of other nasty stuff that would put people in hospital. 90% of the managers are brown-nosers and couldn't care less about their staff. The only culture celebrated there is that of brown-nosing to get places. Only two of the managers there are decent, caring and hard-working people that actually go out of their way to help staff. The upper management as a whole don't recognise hard work, they only see numbers. That trickles down into the behaviour of team managers trying to keep their jobs. This means that people abusing and cheating the system are rewarded, while those picking up the slack BECAUSE of the cheaters are left being penalised and told they're not doing well enough compared to the cheaters. The environment is toxic because the managers more often than not don't know the employment laws/workers' rights and don't like being told that they're not allowed to do x, y, or z, and they will fight you all the way until you threaten them with a tribunal. The senior management are often made aware of changes that need to be made to processes and policies to streamline or improve service experience for both customer and colleague, but will completely refuse to even consider making the necessary change. When things go wrong or something stops working, you're expected to just wing it and pretend like nothing is wrong or that it's not Plusnet's fault. The managers will often promise to help people out with career progression, the company will promise to help people through education by being flexible with shifts or allowing a change of shift but then deny ever having offered assistance. They will claim that your obligation is to them because you signed the contract with them before you went into higher education, they'll refuse to move you into other areas of business or offer you a shadowing experience to help you progress because of some arbitrary and unrelated reason. I've seen it all happen to different colleagues who were doing perfectly fine in their roles. The upper management don't want people progressing or moving to better roles, because that means more hiring and training involved to replace you, so they'd rather force you to stagnate and ignore you and the toxic environment that this creates. They aren't doing anything to combat the haemorrhaging of experienced and knowledgeable staff, which is causing an environment where nobody knows what to do in half of the complex scenarios that need dealing with. They tend to hire management staff externally as opposed to advancing people internally, which leads to managers who don't know the role or the intricacies trying to tell those who do know it what they should be doing and how they're wrong. It's an awful place to work.

Career progression Systems are not the best

Bad management Toxic environment Stressful job

Lack of career progression and payrises.

The company used unreliable systems which made it hard to do every tasks. Which couldn't handle the capacity of a large telecoms company/large customer base but have since been upgraded. It is hard to change shift patterns and you'll start of the graveyard/unpopular shift patterns, so work life balance is gone. First level of training is good but the rest of the tech support training was poor and minimal support provided. No career progression apart from changing into different departments such as sales and provisioning.

No or hard career progression.

Every other review you've read regarding poor management, 0 progression, micro-management, favouritism and discrimination... All true. I've experienced favouritism, been given opportunity to progress over colleagues due to my work relationship with the manager at the time but this progression only got so far with 0 promise of career stability or development structure or pay enhancements. They give you an opportunity to progress but what they're really doing is giving you full responsibilities of a higher role without having to pay you more and call it development. Unfortunately, a pat on the back does not my bills. I've seen nepotism, family members get an easier interview process and more flexibility. Management and HR staff member's wives and sons getting a free pass through initial interview stages. There were a lot of tenure staff when I first joined, however as time went by there was new faces every month. Recruitment quality has been poor and it showed when they would hire anyone who turned up to the interview due to high volumes of staff leaving. Multiple occasions of new starters exhibiting violence and consuming alcohol on site. They preach development, coaching, 121's but its always a team leader who doesn't care. They'd always tell you that they don't care what we do aslong as we do bare minimum and don't get caught. They sell you the dream on your first day but it really is just another call center with a semi nicer office building. Extremely toxic environment, every one in management love to bad mouth their staff and each other. I've seen people getting bullied, and colleagues being coached to the point where management have an excuse to fire them. I've also seen management actively turn a blind eye to poor behaviour. I've seen discrimination although they preach diversity and equality. It was extremely sad and disheartening. Despite the negativity, I was in a good position compared to everyone else however I was promised progression and worked hard towards it to only be let down. Wish I left sooner. To anyone thinking of applying, its fine if you really need a job to pay the bills but once you get your feet you need to get out. There is no real long term future here.

Career progression is quite difficult cause no one ever leaves