TLDR: If you’re applying to Starling based on what you’ve heard before, you might want to reconsider. It’s a different company under the new CEO, Raman Bhatia.
Previous management valued and acted on employees’ opinions through the Peakon survey. Raman halted Peakon and is replacing Starling’s culture with some generic corporate bureaucracy and one-size-fits-all processes. His communication is mostly corporate jargon. The newly introduced performance management framework is confusing, even for line managers and the People Team. He hired an external company, Mindgym, that delivered some ridiculous corporate motivation quotes without a single piece of useful information. A new policy requiring a return to the office “effective immediately“ led to criticism of the CEO on Slack, which Raman blamed on employee misunderstandings in a series of panicky communications. If he can’t foresee people’s reactions on such a basic level, he’s not very good at his job.
Starling won’t collapse overnight, but it’s likely to experience a gradual decline in innovation, quality, and customer satisfaction. The most talented people will leave, and the remaining ones will become frustrated and unmotivated. This is precisely what happened to Raman’s previous company, OVO.
