Pros
A-Safe boasts an impressive product portfolio which is lightyears ahead of its competition. The owners are genuinely passionate about improving workplace safety and are always willing to invest heavily in R&D to further grow its products. The IT systems across the business are some of the best I have ever seen, again they are forever investing in new technologies. They have a huge global presence and offices all over the world, I had the opportunity to travel abroad on multiple occasions. The flexible start and finish time was fantastic. The workforce is mostly young, ambitious, fun people and I made some great friendships whilst working here. I was fortunate enough to report in to 2 of the best managers in the business who always went above and beyond for me. Due to rapid growth I was often exposed to work that was well above my level, the experience I gained at A-Safe helped me walk into a better role elsewhere.
Cons
Like many growing businesses, I found them to be very focused on expanding their products and growing their sales function and the rest of the business felt to be ignored. Some departments were massively overworked but given no more resource, meanwhile R&D, Sales and Marketing were forever expanding. Micro management was the worst I have ever come across, department managers had very little autonomy and it felt as though we were not trusted to do what we were trained to do and what was right by the business - very sad given how skilled most of the staff are. All payrises had to be run by the owners who do not see your inputs on a day to day basis or how hard you have worked. My role developed massively in the 2 years I was at A-Safe and I really put my all in. I was given excuse after excuse before I was told I needed to put a ‘case’ together as to why I deserved a rise so that the owners could review this. This was so demeaning given that the industry standard for my level was 20% higher and I was able to get this easily elsewhere. Benefits were not great, minimum everything with no sick pay (although in fairness as I was leaving new contracts were being rolled out with slightly better benefits). Staff retention is appalling, it felt like they would rather pay more to recruit your replacement than to listen to and retain good staff. On a personal note I did not want to leave A-Safe, I started there genuinely wanting that to be the job that I stayed in. I felt I had no other option but to seek opportunity elsewhere after repeatedly saying how unhappy I was and nothing being done about it. I felt completely overworked and undervalued which took a massive toll on my mental health and no job is worth that.