A company that prioritises profit over planet, and wealth over health - Anonymous employee Dowsing & Reynolds Employee Review

Thank you for your feedback. There is misinformation in this review which we’d like to address fully, but also there are some points which we are absolutely taking on board and actioning. We are thankful for your feedback in those areas. The misinformation includes buying the products very cheaply from overseas. We buy the components for our products from suppliers all over the world, exactly like most retailers do. We ensure that the quality is high and we are very proud of our finished products. Our customers are too. We are heart-broken to read the opinion that we are greedy. We’re a very caring company and we’ve pushed the profits made by the company back into the growth of the business. As we grew in the Pandemic, we needed to spend the profits on the new premises that you talked about in your review, the refurbishment of those premises to create the best working environment we could afford… and into stock. The pressures of Pandemic challenges meant that we now need to carry a lot more stock than previous. The profits also went into hiring new people and giving pay rises to those staff who were showing great progress. We agree that we can do better with carbon offsetting. It’s something we’ve been looking into, but other priorities have meant we’ve been slow to implement this. We will be making sure we action this and we thank you for reminding us of the importance of this. We also agree that the Meet The Team page is out of date, as although quite a few are still with us, we have also happily congratulated some of moving to the next stage of their career with other companies…and some we have recently made redundant. So we understand why you are frustrated that we have not moved quickly enough to remove from the website. We have a new About Us section made and will be putting it live as soon as possible. We are very very proud of the team we have at D&R and we are thankful for their continued support and work. Back to pay: We have been slow to increase the salaries in the Warehouse side of the business and have looked to remedy this. We have conducted a review of the salaries in the Warehouse teams and we have promoted and increased wages of several people. We are recruiting more experienced levels of technicians and operatives for the Warehouse teams, under the new salary structure and we will review more frequently. Listening to staff: We appreciate your thoughts - we need to get better at collecting feedback. We are currently working on an ‘employee voice’ system which allows 24/7 honest & discreet feedback; as we truly value everyone’s thoughts & opinions as we adapt and grow. New ideas from all our employees are taken on board in a safe environment. This will help us to understand any misconceptions and areas that we haven’t been communicating well enough in and remedy these. Thank you for your feedback. Should you wish to talk through any of the points further, we would welcome the opportunity to do so directly. We hope that the context is helpful and we will take away action points as we care deeply about the culture and D&R and we want to keep improving.