5 Apr 2019
Austin International Response
7yI appreciate all the feedback we receive, it's the only way we can continue to learn and grow and is exactly why we have a profile page on Glassdoor. There is always room for improvement, but I feel the feedback you’ve given is not wholly justified.
The reference to the 90's is a little confusing. Austin Fraser was established in 2007, and although I understand the sentiment, we have never been a purely numbers based business. Del and I started Austin Fraser to create a place where people could achieve all of their personal and professional goals. It's fair to say we have and do maintain high standards in sales but we care as much if not more about each person who works at AF.
We provide a number of opportunities to gain feedback from all of our staff. For the last 8 years we have participated (and been in the Sunday Times Top 100) in the best companies list published in the Sunday Times. We have a monthly "Your Say" survey, which gives all staff the opportunity to have their say about what it's like to work at AF. We take this feedback seriously and take the time to take on board areas of improvement and actively make changes and communicate via our all hands session every quarter. Both methods of feedback are completely anonymous. We care about people having their say without the need to know who said what.
We recently posted in a linkedin post about our retention rates bucking the trend across the industry. It's something we pride ourselves on. You commented that you didn't believe these to be correct. Our last 12 months retention rates were calculated by the Sunday Times and independently checked.
Making sure any new employee understands what the role they are coming into to is vital to our ongoing success. We want our new hires to come in with clear expectations in their role. Our retention rate for new starters over the past 12 months is 88.5%, which suggests this is not an area for concern, but of course we will continue to strive to improve this.
With reference to being treated like a child (KPI's and hours), I think it is fair to say that in the past we could have done a much better job. I do not agree that it was ever as you described but I do believe there has certainly been a lack of consistency. We have worked hard to overcome this and I think we are in a really good place. Through our engagement programme, we have rolled out flexibility across all our offices, including relaxed hours, lunch when you’re hungry, work where you are most productive etc. We’ve introduced the ability to use remote days across many departments, and agile working (laptops and mobile telephony for all staff). We will be continuing to push the boundaries not just in the way we work, but also how we empower all of our people to be as effective, trusted and productive as possible.
We take promotions very seriously, and I do not agree that promotions are based on who you are, Instead they're based on achieving agreed objectives and demonstrating our values and behaviours. A suggestion that gender plays any part in the decision to promote someone at Austin Fraser is completely false. There are countless examples of men and women being promoted here and long may that continue. Across our Exec, senior leadership and leadership teams we have many female leaders in key positions, and have always recruited and promoted everyone in the same way.
The comment around if you're female, men at Austin Fraser will try and sleep with you is completely untrue. There have been no instances of this behaviour raised directly or indirectly to either our HR team or our SLT.
I am sorry your experience at AF was a poor one. It's never a good feeling to know someone is disappointed in working at Austin Fraser. I would say that your experience is not consistent with the reviews we've had globally from either past or current employees.
All the best Pete - CEO