6y
Thank you for the blunt feedback. I’m sorry you had such a bad experience here.
I would have loved to talk about your concerns while you were at Conversion, so I could try to help. But I totally understand that you may not have felt comfortable doing so.
I’m keen to share my perspective on the points you raise. Obviously I don’t know who you are or when you worked here, and I appreciate we’ve gone through a lot of change over the last couple of years. But let me at least share my perspective on where we are today.
Training and mentoring – You’re right that we want people to lead their own development. But I don’t agree that people are left on their own and there isn’t sufficient training. We have worked hard on our onboarding (and it’s regularly complimented by new starters). Beyond that, we want people to take ownership of their own development. That’s why we have dedicated training budgets for absolutely everyone, and HR goes blue in the face reminding people to use it. (And to my knowledge, we’ve never turned down a single training request.) We’re not going to lay everything out on a plate – we want to encourage people to direct their training and to take ownership of their work and their progression, and we don’t foster that culture by being prescriptive.
HR – Your feedback feels unfair based on the feedback I get from literally everyone else I’ve spoken to in the company over the last year. But I don’t know what your personal experience was, so it’s hard for me to comment. This is why everyone has 360 feedback from people across the company at least once a year, and can share any concerns with me anytime.
Strategy – I totally agree that our company strategy used to be pretty vague. (There's another review on Glassdoor with the same comment.) But I don’t think that’s the case today (or for the last year or so). Back in 2018 and early 2019 we hadn’t defined our strategy, and as a result we shifted priorities regularly. That changed in H2 2019 – we set an ambitious 6 mo target and as a result, we increased our win rate 55%, while also launching 30% more experiments with a 46% increase in velocity. We then built on this in Nov 2019 by laying out our three year strategy (across people/product/profit). That strategy remains the same today. Since then, we’ve been delivering against that, planning out our targets quarterly and reporting monthly on progress. In my own personal 360 feedback, one of the comments focused on the lack of strategy a year ago, and how today it couldn’t be clearer. I’m sorry that you didn’t get to see this yourself.
Atmosphere – This comment hurts the most – saying that we only care about the work and not the people. We work hard to create an environment that’s inclusive, where we always try to do the right thing for our people. Some examples from the last month…
- One person halved their hours to allow them to look after their child during COVID-19. We kept their pay the same.
- Another person had another job offer and was working their notice period when the UK went into lockdown. The job offer from the other company was then rescinded, so we extended their notice period with us so they could benefit from the furlough scheme.
- And we’re still paying our cleaner while the office has been closed.
I’d love to share more if I can, or to get the opportunity to address your specific concerns, if you’d like. Either way, I hope you have a better experience in your next role.