Simply Business reviews

3.6

57% would recommend to a friend

(305 total reviews)
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David Summers

78% approve of CEO

56% positive business outlook

Simply Business has an employee rating of 3.6 out of 5 stars, based on 305 company reviews on Glassdoor which indicates that most employees have a good working experience there. The Simply Business employee rating is in line with the average (within 1 standard deviation) for employers within the Insurance industry (3.6 stars).

Reviews by job title

305 reviews
5.0
Aug 8, 2019

Great place to work!

Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

I've been at Simply business for almost a year now. It has been great to work at a place where your opinion matters and you are made to feel an important part of the team. It is technically a start up and is growing quickly, which makes room for plenty of growth. Everyone is very encouraging and the company culture is one that allows you to be creative come up with solutions and work hard all while having fun. Benefits are also really good

Cons

None that I can think of

3.0
Aug 4, 2019
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

I would say the main pro is, the people I worked with. They were all really nice, and I learned a lot. Company provides a lot of flexibility, so no clock watching & also pays a lot for training, conferences and so on.

Cons

1 - Hiring a lot of people (especially in engineering) with no plan or support within teams. SB recently introduced a 3-week training to new starters to take them through current applications, culture and so on, but there is absolutely no thought going in to how to onboard these people in teams. Who trains them? How to make time for them when we have deadlines? It is like "Here is more people....onboard." It gets really stressful. 2 - Really bad space planning. They are growing really fast but every time we move office, it seems like we only plan for extra 60 people. You want to find a meeting room, or a quite space or even sometimes a space with your team? Good luck. It can cause a lot of stress. And also the office has these massive windows that are blocked my 'big screens' for team meetings & working under synthetic light all the time is annoying. 3 - There was an attempt to be remote friendly. Though not really. There is no remote culture even though we have remote working people. No thought put into sharing everything online, or arranging meetings. Remote people cannot hear anything most of the time, people continue to talk within themselves and so on. There needs to be a process. (FYI I am not remote.) 4 - Talking about processes, there is no process for most things. There is an ambition to get bigger & more clients, but absolutely no process or plan for this. Leadership team keeps changing people all the time - what is going on there? I stopped paying attention ages ago. We are supposed to be 'product teams', just because we have product managers in teams doesn't make us 'product'. It was just a bunch of project teams that were at the mercy of stakeholders. Don't even dare challenging a stakeholder as your career can depend on it. No process to deal with stakeholders, no process to define product, no process to onboard people IN teams, no process to work with other teams. Everything will collapse very soon. 5 - No trust to engineers. This one is my favourite because it is claimed that there is a lot of trust to engineers, not really though. They like to pretend we are autonomous product teams that are super agile but the truth is there is no 'fail fast' culture. It is 'do not fail, play safe and always use tools that you know - be waterfall' culture. Way to go. 6 - No value given to existing engineers. I heard this is same in most companies, but new hires are given market value salaries, where as existing engineers are being told they are getting the 'highest' of the band they are in where as it is so low for what their role is. There needs to be a consistency, and transparency. As a company trying to get bigger and relies on technology and engineers, they need to do much better.

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Simply Business Response
6y
Hi and thanks for taking the time to leave such detailed feedback. Over the last year, we’ve grown our business substantially and, naturally, this comes with challenges. Maintaining our unique culture throughout this growth period has always been our top priority, and we’d like to think we’re doing a pretty decent job – our regular employee surveys suggest that people really enjoy working for Simply Business. We’ve always been a people-first company and know that creating an environment where people can be happy and fulfilled also results in the best outcomes for our customers. Thanks for sharing your thoughts on our new onboarding program. We’ve worked hard to create a program that’s both engaging and culturally right for Simply Business. The good news is that our onboarding programmes have been very well received by new starters so far, and we’ve always been careful to place new joiners in teams where they can learn from others. Like anything, it’s not perfect. Your feedback is really helpful as we continually look to make the experience as good as possible – both for our new starters themselves, and for the teams they join. With regards to our office, we’ve invested a lot of money in our office spaces across the board, from London to Boston to Northampton. And we’re really proud of them. Feedback on our offices is always hugely positive – whether that’s for our working spaces themselves, or spaces dedicated to downtime (like our breakout areas, roof terrace, or wellness room). Growing our team so quickly does of course mean that the office is more full than it was 12 months ago, and that’s why we’re continually looking at ways we can use our space more intelligently. Our ongoing investment is set to unlock even more private meeting space, which should make booking rooms easier. We’ll also be increasing our number of product pods as we grow – areas that we’ve had fantastic feedback on. It’s our office spaces that allow us to be a remote-friendly company – something we absolutely pride ourselves on. Our meeting spaces come equipped with big screens and Zoom as standard for remote joiners, as do our Product working areas. Tools like Zoom (and Slack) really support this, while our brand new intranet (CAKE) has been a big help in effectively documenting and archiving everything online in one place. We believe strongly in the ‘product’ way of working, pioneered by Marty Cagan (and the Silicon Valley Product Group), and in cross-functional, empowered teams that set their own objectives. We continue to invest heavily in developing our people to help us get better at both building products customers love, and getting there in the most effective way. Honesty, as always, is critical for us in this process. On the subject of salaries, we regularly benchmark against market rates, and proactively adjust salaries for existing staff to make sure we pay fairly. We’re absolutely confident that we compensate our brilliant people fairly for the great work they do. A big thank you again for taking the time to feedback. As you know from your time at SB, we value feedback incredibly highly and know it’s critical to helping us improve. If you’d like to talk further, please don’t hesitate to get in touch. We wish you all the best in the future, and thank you for the years of hard work whilst you were here. All the best, Jen / Head of Talent Acquisition @ Simply Business
3.0
Jul 21, 2019

Mixed Bag

Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Great company benefits, ranging from medical and dental insurance to things as simple as free gym, move tickets In general, they take care to make sure you're supported as much as possible with any changes at home, illnesses etc. The current Future of Work initiative is a huge step in their campaign to help improve a work life balance. A reduction in hours for the same salary is a great boon providing productivity is at the standard it needs to be. Working from home contributes to the flexibility of the job.

Cons

It can take a while to get feedback for things, from call calibrations to feedback from role interviews. Can seem as if progression is helped by your popularity and if you fit the face of the role. It's a company that is growing constantly and is always looking to be pioneers in the industry. But it sometimes causes a breakdown in communication between departments. Selling can be a mentally draining job.

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