Toxic Culture - Please Avoid - Engineer Pleo Employee Review

Pleo practically has an excellent team culture and is a good place to add your skills and your skills.

Most times, team bonding might not favor everyone in some regional part of the world.

Quarterly team camps and nice social activities.

Where do I begin? As others have mentioned in their reviews, you’re sold an absolute dream with Pleo - that’s the best way to put it. They really sell you on autonomy and transparency and how they adhere to the ‘company values’ day in day out, and it couldn’t be further from the truth. There is no transparency, and nothing is communicated with you. It feels so ‘cliquey’, and you quite quickly know if you’re not one of the favourites. During my time, I’ve never felt so under valued and treated so horribly, despite being one of the hardest workers on paper, but apparently that counted for nothing. It was so demotivating, despite what you did you weren’t recognised. Somebody actually got congratulated for making 22 calls in a day during a company meeting - how embarrassing. A prime example was a colleague who hadn’t hit target for 4 months yet still got promoted. Additionally, new starters who had received extremely poor / or no training were put on performance plans in the first 3 months and got fired of their tenure for not hitting targets. All they talk about during the interview process is culture, and I saw the culture absolutely dive bomb into a toxic mess whilst the company tried to rapidly scale, particularly obvious from the VP level management. The processes and CRM were an absolute shambles, yet the management still expect you to hit your targets despite there being such inadequate framework to do so. My 1 to 1s with my manager were abysmal, clearly my manager had no idea how I was doing and wasn’t bothered. I had to effectively structure and fill the 1 to 1s as the manager never prepped for them. HR are unprofessional and in absolute dreamland. They didn’t even bother doing an exit interview with me, despite saying they would. This is a prime example of how they don’t even care and want to try and improve things. Additionally, without naming names, some of the employees, particularly longer standing ones were so so rude, no matter how much effort you made to try and get to know them. It is also hard to trust anyone at the company, considering the people who seem the ‘nicest’ were the ones to turn first and effectively ‘snitch’ on you. Ultimately, they dazzle you with the perks of going to Copenhagen to visit HQ, and these quarterly ‘team camps’, but ultimately the shambolic day to day operations and treatment of staff massively outweigh the perks mentioned above. I’m not the only current / former employee who feels like this, and I understand a lot of people have also left for similar reasons. I would avoid at all cost, there are so many lovely start up companies to work for in London, where you actually get to learn and contribute to the bigger picture.