Sage reviews

Thanks for your feedback. The one thing that strikes me about your review is about how important communication and engagement is. We know this and that's why there's plans to improve this - and some have actually started. I don't normally talk about my own personal experiences when respond to reviews, but for once, I will break this rule. Last week the NE Europe MD, Alan Laing visited our office. He invited colleagues to attend a 'fire side' chat, where he invited questions and he gave excellent and very honest feedback. He even said he could do a lot better when it came to colleague engagement and promised us that he would. The other item you refer to is an employee engagement survey. The global colleague survey launched 2 weeks ago has just closed and the results are being analysed as we speak. Thanks again for your feedback.

Thanks for your feedback about Sage. Work life balance is so important for colleagues, their families and Sage - it's something we believe in and want our colleagues to achieve it, so it's great to hear you do. Our people are great - friendly, helpful and supportive! There's lots of opportunities to build your career at Sage. Our Sage Academy helps you achieve it, you, along with your manager can help you achieve your career plans. There's also some great tips in the 'Career & Recruitment' section in YourSage (specifically 'Top Career Tips') and of course, the fantastic Linda.com with 1000s of hours of L&D videos - from technical courses to career developments ones. Our ambition is to build and provide the best technology and services for the world’s Business Builders. We have huge aspirations for our business – we want to be the worldwide market leader and we have a strategic plan to accelerate our revenue growth and improve our margins with our new generation cloud accounting products to meet this ambition. But we also need to create a high performing culture. Our performance management process is designed to increase the effectiveness of our colleagues and therefore the organisational capability to deliver strong levels of performance. It focuses on results and behaviours, allowing us to reward success and inspire our 13,500 colleagues in a consistent way. Our People Business Partners and Learning & Development Centre of Expertise support our managers in ensuring all colleagues performance ratings are calibrated to objectively help them with consistency, levelling and fairness. We do have guidelines for the distribution of performance ratings (which are available to all colleagues to see via the Sage Academy). We expect managers to understand these guidelines and consider these in the context of business results. Our global performance data for FY16 shows 86% of our colleagues were rated as ‘Meeting Expectations’ or above, showing us that the performance distribution curve was slightly skewed to the right. We anticipate around 15% of our colleagues may fall short of requirements, needing improvement which may be supported through a Performance Development Plan or Performance Improvement Plan to get back them on track. Continued unsatisfactory performance may result in a colleague leaving the business. This approach to managing performance is no different to the majority of established organisations with ambitions to drive performance and ensure the sustainability of their business in the future. Thanks again for reviewing Sage.