Sovini, what can I say about this place, if there ever was a company that lived up to the term all fur coat no knickers this is it.
Here’s what you should know… The company, which promotes itself as having a value of ‘Authenticity’ Is lead by a CEO who severely lacks it, in fact most of the exec team lack it. He and his team have put staff (including other exec team members) under so much pressure it makes them Ill, at which point he discards them as worthless. This is a man who won’t let ‘stress’ in the workforce be mentioned as a real thing, clearly he think he knows better than medial professionals across the world.
The exec team is made up of a group of ‘friends’, a number of which knew each other outside of work before being ‘recruited’, a true jobs for the boys outfit. Most of the exec now have family members working in the Sovini group. People who have been seen to be standing in the way of their family members opportunities have been pressured or restructured out of the organisation. The general feeling is that those family members are largely unemployable outside of Sovini, having been found spending their time internet shopping and having the occasional nap at their desks. The CEO will often call on external experts to advise him, on one such occasion he brought in a family member of one of the exec team who had a serious personal agenda which ended up tearing apart a couple of teams, meanwhile the CEO stood back and let it happen. A number of key staff left as a result of this which has left Sovini in a much worse place.
But if you like a party Sovini (One Vision Housing) is the place to be, well known for racking up huge bar bills funded through housing benefit income, and then there’s the cocaine fuelled staff snorting lines in the office toilets on a Friday night. If that’s not enough have a look at the internet footage of one of the exec members breaking an old man’s jaw in a drunken collision and laughing about it with his pals as they stumble off down the road leaving the man lying in the road.
But it can’t be that bad, they are an award winning ‘best company to work for’, ok so what you don’t know is that Sovini and it’s subsidiaries operate a bonus policy based on retaining existing standards and awards, typically this is paid out around the time of year that staff fill in their ‘best places to work’ surveys by way of an incentive, usually followed by the same old CEO speech of ‘the workforce is our greatest asset’ and ‘you deserve to win this award so consider that in your survey’… getting the picture? Well not just yet, the exec team took it upon themselves to split away from the pay scheme and structure that the rest of the staff have in order to pay themselves huge bonuses and a small group including an exec member was investigated for fraud. The exec team pretend to be a team then ridicule each other behind each other’s back. The exec teams bullying behaviour is mirrored in a number of places throughout the organisation, a truly poisonous place. If you think the problems with Liverpool council were isolated there you’re wrong, Sovini was formed on the back on One Vision Housing who were a stock transfer from Sefton council, so it seems there’s a pattern of behaviour in the Merseyside region.
I could go on into much more detail, but if you’ve read this wondering whether you should work there I hope I have helped you decide.