Just avoid Pleo - Anonymous employee Pleo Employee Review

1.0
Jan 10, 2023
Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

The coffee was decent and I met some nice people.

Cons

Pleo gets you to fall for the dream scenario, with all the right values (trust, transparency, diversity, inclusion, part of the family etc.). Sadly, everything is so far from it. Pleo is highly unstructured and led by clueless managers who just don't want to hear any kind of suggestions for change or improvements. Voicing out concerns or suggestions easily gets you in a "you don't get it, you don't understand Pleo's culture" pile and you become a problem in the team because you actually try to do something. It often felt like joining a cult - the so-called values, lots of staff believing everything the leadership do/say, follow like sheep and refuse to see how messed up that place actually is. It honestly felt like being in high school all over again, with the classic drama, bullying and backstabbing, pretending to be nice and trash-talking behind one's back. Which leads me to layoffs - this has been handled horribly. There were rumours for weeks prior to that date. For months the management knew it's coming, however they kept promising it won't. They took 850 people on a team camp to get 150 sacked less than 2 months later. I'm sure a good bunch of those would've rather kept their jobs than spend 2 days in Croatia. A big part of the layoffs were women, neurodivergent and LGBTQIA+ employees - much for inclusion and diversity right there. Those affected were told to prioritise a company wide announcement to see Jeppe cry for a second just so he could jump straight to sales and markets - I'm sure those who lost their job that day loved it. But the worst part was to see how many were kept based on friendships, likeness and connection to their managers and not necessarily for their skills. A bunch of those got promoted shortly after. And PR - they are good at it! It was sickening to see all the praise they got on LinkedIn for how the layoffs were handled, when that was far from the truth. Now you have it here on Glassdoor, with 4-5 star reviews saying the same thing on and on after each bad review, to boost their ratings once again. Do yourself a favour and stay out of Pleo. With the current leadership and their ways of handling things, it's honestly such a toxic environment to be in.

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Pleo Response
3y
Thank you for taking the time to leave a review. We hear your frustration and appreciate that you've taken the time to give us feedback, particularly regarding the restructuring we've just been through. We readily admit that over the last few months, it’s been hard to make an organisational restructure compatible with our ambitions as a people-first business. There are decisions we’ve had to make that have adversely impacted many of our valued employees. While we have tried to do everything possible to reduce this impact, we hold our hands up; there’s no good way to make redundancies. To address your feedback around Diversity and Inclusion in the business. Unfortunately, laws across some of the jurisdictions we have employees mean we’re not able to share the diversity data for the colleagues we let go. However, we would like to assure you that we worked hard to minimalise bias in decision-making. This included extensive training for all decision-making on unconscious biases and ensuring there was a person in every meeting responsible for calling out where biases may be present, and all final decisions were scrutinised under that lens. Once again, thank you for your feedback, and we wish you all the best in your future endeavours.

Explore other reviews about Pleo

4.0
Oct 4, 2023
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Pleo practically has an excellent team culture and is a good place to add your skills and your skills.

Cons

Most times, team bonding might not favor everyone in some regional part of the world.

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Pleo Response
2y
Thanks for leaving a review! In our more distributed teams, we know it can be more challenging to bring everyone together, but we will continue to explore ways we can get better at this.
2.0
Apr 21, 2020
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Quarterly team camps and nice social activities.

Cons

Where do I begin? As others have mentioned in their reviews, you’re sold an absolute dream with Pleo - that’s the best way to put it. They really sell you on autonomy and transparency and how they adhere to the ‘company values’ day in day out, and it couldn’t be further from the truth. There is no transparency, and nothing is communicated with you. It feels so ‘cliquey’, and you quite quickly know if you’re not one of the favourites. During my time, I’ve never felt so under valued and treated so horribly, despite being one of the hardest workers on paper, but apparently that counted for nothing. It was so demotivating, despite what you did you weren’t recognised. Somebody actually got congratulated for making 22 calls in a day during a company meeting - how embarrassing. A prime example was a colleague who hadn’t hit target for 4 months yet still got promoted. Additionally, new starters who had received extremely poor / or no training were put on performance plans in the first 3 months and got fired of their tenure for not hitting targets. All they talk about during the interview process is culture, and I saw the culture absolutely dive bomb into a toxic mess whilst the company tried to rapidly scale, particularly obvious from the VP level management. The processes and CRM were an absolute shambles, yet the management still expect you to hit your targets despite there being such inadequate framework to do so. My 1 to 1s with my manager were abysmal, clearly my manager had no idea how I was doing and wasn’t bothered. I had to effectively structure and fill the 1 to 1s as the manager never prepped for them. HR are unprofessional and in absolute dreamland. They didn’t even bother doing an exit interview with me, despite saying they would. This is a prime example of how they don’t even care and want to try and improve things. Additionally, without naming names, some of the employees, particularly longer standing ones were so so rude, no matter how much effort you made to try and get to know them. It is also hard to trust anyone at the company, considering the people who seem the ‘nicest’ were the ones to turn first and effectively ‘snitch’ on you. Ultimately, they dazzle you with the perks of going to Copenhagen to visit HQ, and these quarterly ‘team camps’, but ultimately the shambolic day to day operations and treatment of staff massively outweigh the perks mentioned above. I’m not the only current / former employee who feels like this, and I understand a lot of people have also left for similar reasons. I would avoid at all cost, there are so many lovely start up companies to work for in London, where you actually get to learn and contribute to the bigger picture.

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Pleo Response
4y
Hey - thanks for taking the time to write us a review and to share your experience with us. First of all, I'm so sorry that you had this experience while at Pleo. Having favorites and creating an environment where you feel like you're not valued is exactly the opposite of what we aim to do. Please let me address a few of your points: 1. Radical transparency is the way we roll at Pleo. If we see someone not living up to this, or you believe you're missing part of the puzzle, it's up to us to give these folks actionable feedback on their communication style. Employees should know (as much as is appropriate) what's going on - especially when it comes to their roles and department. 2. Pleo is growing - and quickly. We're in a very exciting stage right now - teams are growing each month. We have huge goals that we're hoping to smash. With goals like ours, there's bound to be a ton of change. While it's expected for a company like ours, we understand that change isn't always comfortable. There has been more structure added to the company but we hope that once the growing pains have subsided the end result is more than worth the temporary "chaos." 3. Our culture is crucial to who we are - the type of people who work at Pleo make it an incredible place to work. We try to prioritise this in our hiring process. Once someone is hired and welcomed onboard, it's up to all of us to welcome them to the team. This means discussing the "Pleo way" with them over coffee, inviting them to a Pleo dinner, explaining the team structure to them, explaining what's worked and what hasn't worked for you. It's up to all of us to preserve the Pleo culture. With more and more people joining each month, this can be difficult to maintain but we believe that collectively, we can preserve the Pleo culture as we scale. 4. I'm sorry to hear that you didn't have the best experience with your direct manager. Sometimes, people are put into roles because we see their potential to grow into that role. They're a work in progress, but we believe that with some time, hard work, and coaching, they can crush it. I'm sorry to hear that this was not the case here and urge anyone in a similar situation to reach out to the People Ops team ASAP. Overall, we hope that your experience is not shared by many at Pleo. The People Ops team would personally love to hear from you via email or Slack to discuss how we can better your experience and how we can do a better job. Please don't hesitate to reach out directly so that we can sort this out. Thanks again for submitting your feedback and we hope to hear from you soon!
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