Cadent Reviews

Where to begin? • Negative customer scores now outweigh Safety and have you doing things your of no obligation to do or bribing customers with take aways and hampers for good scores. • New rota's enforced significantly reduce scope for Holidays and Annual Leave due to what Cadent now deem as Critical shifts • Later working (0400 finishes) and more weekends on new rota's • New rota's designed to satisfy a fatigue spread sheet and doesn't account for human factors such as family and private life, working until 0400 during school holidays, ability to book holidays, ability to swap shifts etc.... • New rota's spread a skeletal work force out even thinner because they can't and won't recruit and this is just another plaster over the crack • Cadent G (Employment Contract) offers £36,240 per year, this is not competitive across the industry when other companies offer £39,000+ with simular uplifts and less weekend work, late shifts and call out • Huge blame culture, it's always what you could do better and the accountability for the mistakes made by management stops at the engineers. • Board Senior Management trying to justify their roles all the time with a new flavour of the week which always impacts morale and productivity. • Mental Health is suffering massively at Cadent, and whilst they talk a good talk and issue various things out on a weekly basis to raise awareness they actually fail to realise they're causing the epidemic. • Enforcing new rules to cut down the over time bill and hindering earning potential for Engineers that want to get on

Since the sale from National Grid its all been downhill. Loss of share save scheme No appreciate scheme anymore No Christmas party payment anymore - i mean really? come on Inadequate training facilities - no hot food, packed lunches are awful and thats even if you’re lucky enough to get one. New contracts are significantly less than existing terms and conditions. The new standby pay isn’t worth the hassle of being on call (Good luck in the future with manning the rota on them rates!) Also 42 working week is a joke, another way to get you working longer for less money. Management say this is still competitive, everyone else disagrees. Hows your recruitment going? Field force bonus scheme - good at the moment but management want it gone, again all down to cost cutting. Moral is at an all time low - too many cutbacks and these new starter contracts have left the field force feeling undervalued. PPE limits - seriously!? Somebody who has never held a spanner in their life gets to decide how many pairs of clothes i can have a year, absolute joke. No training or development opportunities for field force employees and no suitable training for new equipment, just go out there lads and get the job done. Cutbacks to maintenance schedules are opening up skill gaps in the work force making it more difficult for engineers to gain experience and up skill. What will you do when all your 40 years experience plus engineers have gone and their is no one to replace them……. Every decision is about money- money, money, money thats all the owners think about, paying their massive dividends and not investing in ageing assets. Your treatment of vastly experienced employees is appalling and quite frankly you should be embarrassed. Rather than retrain them on the same T&C’s and let them have flexible working (to aid with retirement) you’d rather see them leave. All because of the new terms and conditions - absolutely embarrassing. Too much emphasis on 'soft skills’ and no care given to actual engineering work. We are an infrastructure based business that needs constant maintenance, yet you wouldn’t think so. way too much travelling, feel more like a delivery driver than an engineer to be honest. Planning - At times is abysmal and non existent. Job times are constantly being chipped away, does not include travelling time and mostly don’t reflect the nature of work needed. This is impacting quality of work and safety. Cadent - who actually knows who we are and what we do!? not many people because of a lack of an advertising campaign, again all down to cost. For such a big company its embarrassing that employees have to constantly explain what and who we are. The future doesn’t look bright - we are being structured in a way that would suggest the company will be broken up and each network sold off. Im sure in ten years even more conditions will have been eroded away with this current regime. I'd avoid and join one of the other utilities - top tip.