Once good. Now not. Avoid. - Anonymous employee Ably Employee Review

Thank you for your review. This feedback is of course disappointing and we’re very sorry to hear you developed a negative view of the company during your time here. At Ably we strongly believe in fostering a positive culture within our team. To us that means, amongst other things, that employees have a healthy work/life balance, that salaries are fair and competitive, and that we provide benefits that are amongst the best available for a company of our size. We’re very proud of the work we do in these areas which is what we want to respond to some of the points raised. Firstly, we are focussed on productivity and will continue to be. We’re a growing scaleup with ambitious goals, and focussing on efficiency is essential if we want to be successful. But productivity doesn’t equal working longer hours: we do not expect regular overtime from our staff and we actively check in on work-life balance via managers. The flexibility we offer is often one of our highest scoring areas in employee feedback: 90% in our most recent survey. We don’t have a clock in/clock out culture at Ably; ultimately we care more about what gets done than the hours people work. Some people work longer hours because they’re committed to what we’re building, and of course there are occasional circumstances where overtime is necessary (e.g. if there’s a critical client issue). For a business with our ambitions and standards this is sometimes unavoidable - but we have policies in place to account for this, including compensation and holiday in lieu where appropriate. With regards to pay, salaries at Ably are based on extensive market research of what’s competitive for companies in our industry and of a similar size and scale. We believe this data-driven approach is the correct one and helps us to avoid subjective pay discussions, which can lead to significant unintentional discrepancies, favouritism, and discrepancies in ethnic or gender groups, etc. It also means we can state with confidence that salaries at Ably are in the upper percentile in comparison with the market. The full list of benefits we offer employees is publicly available at ably.com/ukbenefits and ably.com/usbenefits. The only benefit we have reduced (from what is advertised here) was scaling back the amount of designated learning and development time we offer employees; from 2 days per month to 1 day per month. We took this decision as some teams felt this allocation was reducing their ability to have an impact and the data told us that only a very small percentage of people across the business were using the full allocation. We believe that offering employees 12 days per year to dedicate to learning and development offers more parity across the company and is still a very generous policy for a company of our size (and more can be granted at a manager’s discretion). We always endeavour to do better and improve ourselves, and we’d welcome the opportunity to discuss your concerns in more detail and provide additional clarity on our decision making processes - please feel free to reach out to anyone in the People Team via email (people.team@ably.com).