Upper management, both at Sage Payment Solutions and with Sage as a whole, is absent and gives no clear direction about where Sage is going. New ideas are pushed and then abandoned for the next big thing after countless resources are wasted over many months. Employees are expected to use broken software systems that necessitate many manual processes and that get in the way of what they were hired to do, creating countless inefficiencies. The systems that are used are laughable for a tech company, and the temporary manual processes that are created as workarounds end up being used for years.
The new CEO of Payments, who is no improvement from former or interim management in being detached and seeming cluelessness to the inner workings of the division, has proclaimed more than once that "spending is wasting" (which may be a new Sage motto as well). Maybe true, and definitely true if he's referring to the excessive upper management team that seems to serve no real purpose, but still a disheartening thing to hear as a people manager of a team of good workers who already feel underpaid, under appreciated, and unheard. Salaries for employees in front-end risk/loss prevention are around $40-$45K (hardly anything in the DC-metro area), which is disturbing when you consider that these same people are making high-consequence financial decisions on the company's behalf.
HR is a joke. They side with management on all matters, and it's becoming increasingly more difficult to hire new people at SPS. In my department, it took nearly 4 months to backfill one low-level position while Sage execs and HR bumbled around deciding whether or not the backfill was necessary (this is after the former employee was terminated with HR's full support, and after HR assured us that backfilling wouldn’t be an issue). Then, when HR finally gave the green light for the recruiter to make a verbal offer to a potential candidate, the offer ended up being rescinded a few days later because of new hiring policies that were rolled out. In my 4 years as hiring manager, I hired 9 people, and maybe 1 of them went off without an HR/recruiter induced hitch or delay. And that pretty much sums up the lack of communication, lack of transparency with leadership, and lack of support from HR or management that seems to have become the norm.
In the past 3 years, employee morale has continued to decline to the point now where very few people seem to care about Sage as a brand and instead are just clinging to their jobs, keeping their heads down, and wondering how long they're going to survive before Sage changes direction once again and decides their roles are no longer needed.
