Support Empower Advocate Promote Reviews

I worked in Head Office from Oct 2014. The organisation has rebranded to The Advocacy People, but this has not been ported into Glassdoor. I would not have stayed with an organisation for 6 years if it was a terrible place to work, even with the current job climate. The office atmosphere can be great as are many of the people. However, there are some serious issues that the company need to address. The company struggles with IT, despite a very good, if very small, IT team. I suspect this is due to an attitude that, where current staff are underconfident with IT, it is better to just not improve IT and stick with 'the old ways' rather than train. Some great improvements were made with rebranding, but some steps backward have taken place as well. In theory, and on paper, our support for working parents is great - we even won a Working Families award some time back. But when I moved into a role in the Training Department, anticipating a need for a flexible role due to becoming pregnant, the day before I was due to go on maternity leave I was told home working would not be permitted after all and so I requested it formally rather than informally. In the end, I was made forcibly redundant during maternity leave, but offered my old job back at the same salary to cover their legal obligations. Back in the Contact Centre, I'd made it clear that I wanted as much flexibility and home working as possible. Now a Contact Centre has contractual obligations around answering times which I of cousre understood, but I was repeatedly told that the role would not suit home working, not even for handling contact off phones. I did not agree but accepted this until home working was forced on us by COVID, at which point it became abundantly clear that it was entirely possible to do the full role at home. Our competitor organisations were not only offering home working for their comparable roles, but were hiring for the identical role for far superior wages, fully home based. A side note here - despite the role needing a great deal of contract knowledge, advocacy knowledge and the soft skills to handle supporting vulnerable people and suicidal calls, the role is undervalued. I should also note that the role is very high stress and that staff turnover was very high. The resistance to flexible working was therefore very evidently due to management discomfort rather than lack of scope in the role. After seeing a very ugly side to the organisation, with favouritism, cronyism and downright bullying, particularly around trying to force staff to come back into the office (unnecessarily) during lockdown, I decided to cut my losses despite the CEO becoming involved in a positive way and walked away. I've now passed probation in a new role, fully home based. I genuinely hope The Advocacy People has the courage to adapt to the changing world we live in, lose it's clique-y practices and continue a good start in heeding calls for innovation, but I'm not terribly confident it will happen.