Orwellian vibe and Misleading culture - Energy Specialist Octopus Energy Employee Review

Hi there, Thank you for taking the time to leave us such a thorough review. We appreciate your feedback. While we’re sorry you didn’t have a positive experience during your time, we know this isn’t representative of a lot of our operations team. Our set-up is fully focussed around teams and customers. Our onboarding training for Energy Specialists is 6 weeks long which includes a number of practical elements and problem solving before joining a team and helping customers. When you join a team, it’s a great opportunity to learn even more as you’re surrounded by experienced team members who are really willing to support you. For our leaders, we run developmental programmes and run thoughtful and thorough recruitment processes to ensure we have really capable team members moving into leadership roles. We’re not prescriptive on how a manager should manage as we encourage them to tailor their style to the needs of their team. Many leaders choose to not schedule in fixed breaks because, in most cases, our team members prefer to take their breaks at a time that suits them. Updating whereabouts on channels is not intended to make the team feel ‘watched’ but more to make sure there’s still a good amount of support for customers who are getting in touch. Our weekly Family dinner is time during work hours for teams to connect with the company and share updates. We encourage as many people to attend in person as possible, but understand all weeks are different and some teams prefer to watch from the laptops whilst finishing up with work before the weekend. Training and ensuring a high quality of service for customers is a big part of our coaching. Leaders have access to lots of quality data and are encouraged to look out for negative customer experiences and help turn these around. Whilst we don’t get it right every time, it’s one of the reasons we have a 4.8* score on Trustpilot and have recently been named a Which? recommended supplier for the 7th year in a row. It’s upsetting to hear you felt you had nowhere to turn. Whilst we purposefully have a flat structure so everyone stays close to our customers and Energy Specialists, our set-up is designed to be fully supportive. Our Energy Specialists are by Team Leaders who in turn are led by Operations Managers who are led by a Head of Operations. As well as being on site and on hand to help, it’s common for leaders to hold drop-in sessions to provide a space for anyone in the team to share their ideas or feedback. We try to ensure our Energy Specialists are paid fairly through benchmarking salaries frequently, the most recent review being at the start of this year. For those who want to take on more responsibility, we have the skills academy and managers are able to reward fantastic performers too. Thanks once again for your detailed feedback, and we wish you well in the future. Erin Bullions Head of Operations Octopus Energy