Sage reviews

3.5

63% would recommend to a friend

(5,261 total reviews)
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Steve Hare

70% approve of CEO

60% positive business outlook

Sage has an employee rating of 3.5 out of 5 stars, based on 5,261 company reviews on Glassdoor which indicates that most employees have a good working experience there. The Sage employee rating is in line with the average (within 1 standard deviation) for employers within the Tecnologías de la información industry (3.9 stars).

Reviews by job title

5K reviews
1.0
May 5, 2018

Going down the pan

Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Sage used to be a great company to work for. Then for a while it was merely good. Now, it's unfortunately a toxic company whose sole focus seems to be to squeeze as much money out of the customers and reduce costs via the grossly unfair performance management system. There are some redeeming features. The wages are around standard for the North East, there is a bonus scheme of up to 20% if you are in a global function, the building and surroundings are nice and you get 5 days where you can go an help out in a variety of charities etc.

Cons

The biggest problem Sage has at the moment is the cloud based strategy that they seem to be trying to force our customers onto. The half year results seem to show that it's not something our customers want. There also seems to be an excessive focus on selling, as opposed to giving good customer service and as a result technical support people also have sales targets. There's been and continues to be a massive brain drain as more experienced people get sick and leave. The second major gripe is the performance management system. We were promised that last years "stacked rankings" had been discontinued, but it has become apparent this is not the case. This means that you always have to have some people in the lower part of the scale, which means an immediate performance improvement plan. I've luckily avoided this so far, but I'm aware of people who in no way could be said to be not doing their job being put onto these, which is unfair and causes unnecessary stress. Perhaps Sage does have a performance problem, I don't know but introducing such an arbitrary way of marking people down is terrible. Another side-effect of the performance management is that it encourages negative behaviours amongst colleagues with people sacrificing others to save their own skin. As you'd imagine it doesn't make for the best working atmosphere at times. The company has also become extremely top-heavy. Almost weekly we get a new VP or EVP of something or other and people don't really know what they do!

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Sage Response
8y
Thank you for taking the time to share your perspectives with us. We are a high-performance culture, and our performance requirements reflect that culture. Our colleague surveys do indicate that our colleagues want clearer parameters around performance expectations, and we are already making those changes based directly on that feedback.
2.0
Sep 8, 2017

Bell Curve performance process is totally unfair

Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Great employees and flexible work hours.

Cons

Unfair performance processes and incomparable wages.

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Sage Response
8y
Thanks for your feedback. Sage has fantastic people right across the globe, they are friendly and professional and we understand the success of Sage is down to each and every one of us working towards collective goals. Regarding salaries, Sage uses market data, cost of labor and adjusted pay rates based on location to develop our salary structure. When colleagues move to a role of the same size and complexity, from a parity/fairness viewpoint, a base salary increase wouldn’t be appropriate. 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 your views.
3.0
Jul 26, 2017

Don't work in Irvine

Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

The people at the company are phenomenal. They are the best group of people that I have ever had the honor of working with. Highly intelligent, caring, and fun loving.

Cons

Company is reducing their foot print in Irvine. They don't say it, but everyone knows that Sage will eventually leave Irvine. Also, the company makes too many changes too quickly resulting in frustrated customers and employees.

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Sage Response
8y
Thanks for your feedback. Yes, we agree that our people are amazing - we work hard and play hard! We are still recruiting in Irvine and it's a strategically important centre for Sage. We regularly gain feedback from our customers to gain their insights and act upon them too. Recently we've just undertaken a global colleague survey and held focus groups based on the feedback to really understand the issues. The feedback/plan will be shared at the FY18 kick-offs in October. Thanks again for your review.
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