Would not recommend - werkgeversreview Graduate Energy Specialist bij Octopus Energy

- There a lot of false, huge promises made when you first begin your employment here. Initially, you are told there's a strong chance of progression in whatever your area of interest may be and that there will be regular meetings about your "progression". Realistically, those who progress will be whoever your managers favourites are and it is clear that favouritism is very prevalent. It is a game of how long you've been here mixed in with a huge game of "who likes you", rather than ability. I believe that they initially tell you this to lure capable graduates into a tough call centre role, and do not paint an accurate picture of what your everyday life will be like in the job. If you are looking for a graduate job where you will learn transferable skills and professional acumen, this is not the job for you and do not let them make you believe it is. If you value your employees, remunerate them correctly. Don't just throw a £20 voucher their way every couple months to disguise the fact we are paid just about minimum wage and think we are too foolish to realise. - Heavily target driven. You are constantly reminded of both yours, and your colleagues statistics on a daily basis thus quantity is valued over quality. This leads to tasks not being executed correctly, which in turn results in angry customers and more work for anyone who comes across the account. This would be acceptable if it was in clear in the job advertisement how important targets were to the role, but this is omitted for some reason. You are reminded of your targets daily and are questioned if you don't meet their expectations. - Disjointed management. Your workload will depend on whoever your manager is, and what is expected of you is also conditional to this. Having spoken to workers from across several offices, it seems targets and workloads differ vastly depending on the team you are placed in. During your training you are told that this is merely "different styles" of management, and how apparently no one is getting "more support than another" once it is revealed by conversing with your colleagues that some people have been set targets that are upwards of what is expected of a full-time trained employee, whilst others are have been asked to just write notes on what they believe should be said in an email back to a customer until a manager checks over them. We all get paid and are in the same role so there is no justifiable reason for the workload and schedule to differ to that extent. - Favouritism. Favouritism is crazy at this company and you truly feel it in every office. When you begin, there is so much promised to you in regards to your own personal growth and what the office "culture" is like. They claim they are one big happy "family" but I do not find this to be true at all. There is an extremely cliquey culture that has been developed by Octopus, which not only makes it uncomfortable for many new hires to adjust, considering how many of the long-term existing co-workers can be cold and unfriendly- and due to the nature of the work, you will need to ask for help from your more senior colleagues. This causes problems as you will need help from senior management or specialists while you are dealing with an angry customer on the phone, but they will simply ignore your query and respond to a question asked after you, by someone they know and like. This slowly will drain on you, as you quickly learn that in order for your job to be do-able, you need to befriend and brown-nose the right people. If you are a managers favourite, you can avoid doing the parts of work that you don't want to do- as they'll let that slide, which is very annoying for people who don't spend their time sucking up and/or who have no interest in willingly spending their nights and weekend working. Some of the the kissing-up is nauseating. - Hours. They try to justify your hours by saying you will need to work overtime on the rare occasion, maybe once a month or so. This is not the case, you are expected to fix existing customer problems whilst 95% of your allocated time is dedicated to responding to new customer issues. So I struggle to see when we have time, during our contracted hours, to complete all the tasks assigned to us. The answer to this is unpaid overtime on the regular. Most people spend at 30 minutes to an hour daily of their own time trying to fix customer problems as there is not enough time scheduled in the day for an agent to successfully fix an issue whilst trying to hit their targets.