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!
