Don’t Recommend - Toxic - Anonymous Silverbean Employee Review

1.0
22 Dec 2024
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

- Good agency, quality service and focus on strong client delivery - Lots of colleagues friendly, tight knit community - Good social events - Increasing prioritisation of CSR and volunteering to give back - I love Flexi work and ability to work from anywhere

Cons

- Delivery Team continually stretched incredibly thin. High pressure, high demands, high workloads - Management often seem to never care about wellbeing of staff. - Number rating system - every month you are ranked from 1-5. 5 is near impossible to get, most people just a 3. It feels impersonal and a rather statistical inhumane system which decreases moral. - Bullying and gossip culture - personally I have struggled with people within the team and has lead to ongoing bullying, mental health issues and loss of confidence. - Strict and overly structured - the internal team has lots of deadlines (ie. reporting deadlines), extensive policies, structures and is inflexible about these. Often the policies and deadlines are too rigid (more than they should be). - Pay - not competitive compared to similar companies in industry, not great. - Redundancy culture - management will remind you of this and how they have made people redundant. - High turnover - Management are often are under equiped and don’t know how to personalise their management style or communication to different people depending on their personality, needs, or inappropriately react appropriately to certain situations. - Limited acknowledgement, unfair reward system/ difficult recognition system - even where you perform well or receive glowing client feedback, it’s a fight to get noticed. You are heavily reliant on your manager to push for you or your colleagues to vote you for awards (popularity). - Fan Favourites - Consistently visible throughout the company. This is never acknowledged by management. Always same people winning awards and voted for them (usually friends with management) and given leniency on workloads.

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Silverbean Response
1y
Thank you for sharing your honest and valuable feedback with us. We truly appreciate you taking the time to express your concerns and experiences at the Agency. It’s great to hear the pros you experience at the Agency including strong client delivery, your friendly colleagues and the CSR work the team have been completing. You have listed a number of cons in your review that we would like to address: First of all we always take allegations of bullying extremely seriously and all reports of bullying are investigated in line with our grievance policy and addressed in a timely manner. We want to assure you that we do not have a redundancy culture. Our goal is to strategically manage our resources to ensure team stability and avoid unnecessary redundancies. We are concerned by your statement that some members of the management team have mentioned redundancies. We will speak to you separately on this and address it directly with the individuals involved. We value the well-being of all our employees and are committed to creating a supportive and healthy work environment. As this is a priority of ours we will reach out for more specifics on this from you. You have suggested that we have management training, we are pleased to notify you that we restarted our people management training in November. Our performance management system is designed to provide constructive feedback, recognise high performance, and identify areas for growth and development. Thank you for your feedback on pay and recognition, we will be communicating our new pay and recognition policy in our All Hands meeting at the end of this month. Simplifying processes and improving efficiency are key priorities for us this year. We are actively working on initiatives to streamline our workflows and enhance productivity. We encourage you to reach out to a member of the People Team or the SMT team if you have any further questions or would like to discuss these matters further. The People Team

Explore other reviews about Silverbean

5.0
24 Oct 2021
Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

They really value and look after their people. Great company benefits (unlimited annual leave!), flexible working conditions and everyone is very friendly. Company is filled with industry experts and is experiencing rapid growth.

Cons

None for me so far.

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Silverbean Response
4y
Hi, Thanks for leaving a review - we love to hear from our employees, Glad you are enjoying the company benefits! Regards The Recruitment Team
1.0
3 Dec 2025
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Nice office Good hybrid working policy

Cons

Work load - it’s a company wide issue all the way from executives up to senior managers , that working more than you allocated hours is necessary. Low pay - pay threshold is low compared to the market Progression - very limited progression , the jump from executives to manager to senior manager is extremely high / the frequency these roles come up , is extremely low Very cliquey- if you are not close / respected by certain a certain individual - it is made very apparent and you are pushed out both socially and professionally. Widespread strategy change - company direction and structure changes frequently , without much warning.

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Silverbean Response
5mo
Thank you for taking the time to share your experience. We're glad to hear you found the office environment and hybrid working policy positive. On workload, this is something we take seriously. We rely heavily on accurate time tracking from everyone across the business so we can spot pressure points, allocate resource properly and step in where support is needed. When time isn’t tracked in detail, it limits our ability to take the right action - so we continue to reinforce its importance and review workload trends regularly. We do recognise that, as a smaller agency, progression opportunities don’t come up as frequently as in larger organisations. We’re focused on how we can support development in other meaningful ways, even when formal role moves aren’t immediately available. Without having further context on some of the other points you raised, it's hard for me to respond to those meaningfully here. We appreciate your feedback and wish you all the best for the future.
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