Sage reviews

3.6

63% would recommend to a friend

(5,254 total reviews)
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Steve Hare

71% approve of CEO

60% positive business outlook

Sage has an employee rating of 3.6 out of 5 stars, based on 5,254 company reviews on Glassdoor which indicates that most employees have a good working experience there. The Sage employee rating is in line with the average (within 1 standard deviation) for employers within the Informationstechnologie industry (3.7 stars).

Reviews by job title

5K reviews
1.0
Sep 5, 2018

Avoid this sinking ship

Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

FTSE 100 company (may not be a case soon). Good benefits if you manage to get them. Would say great people but all my colleagues already resigned.

Cons

Avoid this company, It is NOT worth it. Sage is not a technology company. Imagine used car salesman trying to break into “cloud business”. This is the mentality and work culture in Sage. The products are one of the big weaknesses. Sage has no true cloud products. Rebranding desktop products as “cloud” and charging more is not a strategy. Using support teams to push sales does not make sense. Your customers paid extra for the support not for talking to salespeople. Truly toxic culture. Bullying and harassment. Senior leaders with a history of verbal and emotional harassment are still in the business. HR is helpless when you bring those issues to them. They will advise you to drop it in fear of retaliation from the leaders. Old boys club. It is difficult to understand how the company is performing. CFO is bragging to investors about having a good quarter when in fact the business did not hit the target. Constant employee churn on every level. CEO being fired, CMO left, CIO left, CPO left, many VPs and MDs left (50+). The company went through five managing directors in the UK over the last two years. Some teams disappeared completely, when every member left. Sage has one of the lowest rankings on Glassdoor for the “tech” company. There are good reasons why: Unfair. Every six months employees are subject to “bell curve” reviews. Every team has to find 20% members who ‘underperformed’. You may achieve all your personal goals and objectives but will be deemed as ‘underperforming’ by your manager. Managers have to meet the quota. 
 Won’t pay your contractual bonus. CFO didn’t like the mid-year results and unilaterally decided that Sage won’t pay any bonus for that period. The company didn’t pay bonuses in the last two years. The years when the bonuses were paid, you will get usually a fraction of the bonus anyway. The payout will be tied out to your bell curve rating, company performance, country performance etc. Dishonest. Do not believe positive reviews on the glass door. Sage employees are incentivised to post positive reviews for perks. Do not believe Sage HR response on the Glass Door either. Despite what HR claims on Glassdoor, there has been a hiring freeze. This was recently confirmed in public by Sage CMO during one of all hands meetings.
 Greedy. Just google independent review of Sage CEO and CFO salary pay. It is the highest in the industry while the business is not achieving its targets. Independent watchdog PIRC criticised Sage. Constant cuts. No technology investment, travel freeze (18 months in a row), training freeze, no team outings or team lunches. Everything is being cut except CEO and CFO compensation. 
 Chaotic. Sage calls themselves matrix type organisation, but this is far from the truth. What you get is organisational chaos, multiple people doing the same job and teams with overlapping responsibilities. It results in the inability to agree on anything, missing deadlines and stressful work environment. Nepotism. Senior managers prefer to hire colleagues from previous companies. If you are offered a job do your research on LinkedIn around the prospective boss and the new team. Extremely Slow. It takes weeks/months to get a company laptop or mobile phone. New people are hired but can't do any work in the first weeks. Sage fails to procure a laptop for them. It takes weeks to get access to employees portal or to access your payslips online. No scope for growth. No progression or career path. You were hired to do one job only, and that’s it. No strategy, all that matters are this week sales targets. JFDI mentality among management.

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Sage Response
7y
Thanks for reviewing us. Sage is a high performance focused organization, and change is constant. This kind of fast paced environment is not for everybody, but for most of our colleagues, they embrace the path of strong growth and transformation. Recently, Sage needed to make improvement to our business and streamline our processes to drive our performance – this resulted in a number of colleagues leaving the business. Although it is never easy, those colleagues will always be part of the Sage family and we ensured they left in a respectful and compassionate manner. Although we cannot publicly discuss the process, you can be assured that we the value of “do the right thing” in mind. To clarify a couple of aspects of your review. Stephen Kelly has stepped down as a director and CEO. He will remain available to the Group until he leaves on 31st May 2019. Our CPO has not left, Amanda has been interim CPO for about a year now. Our CIO has also not left the business, we had an interim CIO, now we have a permanent one. Our CMO left Sage 18 months ago, and Ron was interim and made permanent last month. We are proud of current and former colleagues; it makes us feel immensely proud when former employees go onto enhance their careers. We never ask for positive reviews, I am happy to share with you the email I send out asking for reviews - here's a quote from the email - "we want ratings to be a true reflection of life at Sage." - Glassdoor recommends we ask people for reviews, so there's nothing different here to what other companies do. We categorically do not have a hiring freeze. Take a look at sage.com/careers...as of today over 130 jobs live and that's excluding France, Germany, Switzerland, Belgium, Australia, Malaysia and Singapore. There also is not a travel ban. All we are doing, like any business, is being prudent with our money.
1.0
Jul 18, 2018

Support Services

Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

The perks have all been cut for five years. There is nothing great about working here.

Cons

Disconnected management on all levels. No pay increases as there has been hiring and promotion freezes for years. All perks and bonuses have been severed. The work load is incredibly outrageous.

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Sage Response
7y
Thanks for your feedback. Reading that you've experienced cuts in perks for five years surprises me. It's not something Sage does. Please contact me to give me more details and I will look into this - lynne.ellis-parker@sage.com We don't have a hiring freeze and never had. In fact, we have over 450 live jobs available now. All we are doing - which is quite right and prudent, is reviewing in more detail all the job requests. There's also not been any promotional freezes - 25% of all jobs globally are filled by internal colleagues, and in North America this figure is 27%. Also, bonuses have not been severed, many colleagues have received bonus/discretionary payments and pay rises over the last two years. We also receive lots of positive feedback, internally and externally about a good work life balance. If you feel you feel yo are not achieving this, talk to your manager and work together on solutions.
1.0
May 16, 2018

A once great company now in terminal decline...

Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

• Great people who are willing Sage to succeed • Good benefits and Pay • Sage Foundation is a great contributor to society

Cons

Appalling Senior Leadership CTO, CEO, CFO, and EVPs without exception. Most VPs are appalling leaders, with an ability to create the perfect conditions for sure-fire failure! We have a myriad of specialist VPs who focus on the minutiae of the business where these roles would have typically been fulfilled others as a part of their role, or by lesser roles. The business is so fragmented that it is impossible to move things forward supported by a blame culture that stems from the very top of the organisation. What the city analyst see in Sage is perplexing because new online solutions Accounting, Financials, and Enterprise (not really online) are a million miles away from where they need to be. Our competitors have us beaten here, yet there is naivety of the City to believe what our failed CEO & CFO says about our success and transformation. • We had some training needs in Q1, and have addressed these with Sales!?! Come on! • H1 We had some localised challenges and have taken decisive action!! Really! • We have the best business platform in Sage Business Cloud! Shoot Me! • We have invented a magical way to create value from nothing! Ok that isn’t true, but it may as well be. City Analysts!!! What the heck are you doing! Do your job! Ask some probing questions! And the golden thread will surely unravel. Make no mistake there has been a transformation, one to oblivion and insignificance. Our products need life support, so we invent a marketing term “Sage Business Cloud” to wrap these products up in a digestible diversion. Not only do we do this, but we then say it is growing by 57%! What does this mean, and where is this revenue coming from… growth? We fail slow and repeat frequently! Well as fast as slow failure will allow! Constantly putting barriers in the way of success, costs constraints, forced distribution, this is leading to attrition and paralysis. Getting new roles approved is like getting a meeting with the Pope. Yet we constantly push people into the lower performance curve resulting in our top performers leaving in addition to the ones we aggressively manage out of the business. We love to do acceleration cases, 99% of which result in nothing. Roll play: EVP: Wouldn’t it be great if we could deliver new product x to market in 6 months? Have a think about it and tell me what you need? Team: 1 week of intense activity EVP person, we have looked at the market and it is our view that to deliver a world beating product we would need 18 people for 6 months. EVP: Great we’ll give you 2 additional head, and oh we need the product in 6 weeks. [Cycle of failure to be repeated every 6 months…] We recently lost 30 execs from the business, and whilst I would not say all should not have left we have found ourselves in a frightening situation. 1. Majority of our established business leaders have left (decades of understanding) 2. We have an influx of VPs and EVPs who have little or no experience of Sage or indeed running any business of scale 3. The leadership capability within the business is at the lowest since our inception Steve Hare & Steven Kelly are delusional are lining their pockets for as long as they can, reaping from the suffering and destruction of a national treasure. Steve Hare was at the helm of Marconi during its demise and given the opportunity I believe he will do the same for Sage. I can see his LinkedIn strapline now “I have been instrumental in the demise of not one but two FTSE 100 companies, but don’t worry I did really well in the process 😉”. Steven Kelly, well what can I say! He is incredibly driven and blind to the fact he is driving the business to oblivion, he needs to be removed ASAP. Although I fear the damage is so severe now Sage will never recover.

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Sage Response
8y
Thanks for your review. Every decision that is made is meant to directly benefit our customers, our colleagues, and achieve our company goals. That includes hiring only high performing team members and ensuring the wellbeing of all 14,000 current colleagues from around the world who come to work every day, love what they do, and see our future as bright. All companies have room for improvement, so I invite you to share your perspective through our many internal channels where you can be heard. Although we think your review may not be a fair picture of Sage, we very much appreciate your choosing to be a part of the team.
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