NESTA Reviews

3.4

52% would recommend to a friend

(140 total reviews)

Ravi Gurumurthy

49% approve of CEO

36% positive business outlook

NESTA has an employee rating of 3.4 out of 5 stars, based on 140 company reviews on Glassdoor which indicates that most employees have a good working experience there. The NESTA employee rating is in line with the average (within 1 standard deviation) for employers within the Non-profit and NGO industry (3.7 stars).

Reviews by job title

140 reviews
1.0
19 Mar 2021
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Nice office (not that this is much benefit at the moment).

Cons

Anyone thinking of working at Nesta please read the recent reviews. The ones saying that the organisation has changed are right. Having been there for nearly 4 years i can tell you that the organisation has changed dramatically and not for the better. As someone who worked in the third sector before and is of a centre-left political leaning i thought i would fit in. But the new CEO (NOT Geoff Mulgan by the way, he was great) has brought his own political agenda as well as his own staff. He pushed through a big and unnecessary restructuring which saw lots of really talented people leave just so that he could pursue his own agenda (we spent almost a year on an internal strategy consultation which strangely enough ended up with the pet topics which he had suggested the month he arrived). Some other reviews have called him 'woke'. I hesitate to use that term but he is the type who talks constantly about privilege and is not interested in any framing of any problem which does not start from that position. He has divided the staff rather than unifying them (maybe that is a deliberate tactic to make it harder for staff to protest redundancies?) Some staff of a similar political persuasion have been posting five star reviews here to support him. But it is not a happy environment for many of us at the moment and like many people i dont know how much longer i will stay here. That makes me sad since i used to love this place.

1.0
16 Oct 2020
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Friendly employee base, cool office space

Cons

Car Crash in 2020 with an inexperienced CEO pushing his political agenda with a coterie around him. The new senior management team are lackeys brought in from the CEO's previous organisation; new focus areas have heavy party politics baggage and the Trustees seem to have abdicated all responsibility of employee welfare. The Board papers for strategy approval say something but the verbal communication to staff is quite contrary

1.0
11 Feb 2024
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Salaries are decent for the charity sector.

Cons

Nesta used to be innovative and part of the excitement was that there was a portfolio of projects and ways of experimenting with systemic change. Now the whole organisation is structured around behavioural insights (flawed/ biased at best, manipulative at worst) and is swiftly losing credibility in the field of public and social innovation. There's a lack of understanding of basic design principles or care for experts by experience / actually engaging the communities they are supposedly serving - sure, hire a software designer to do service design, it's basically the same thing, right? Also severe nepotism in the senior leadership team, who all gave themselves nice salary bumps as they were making a majority of the organisation redundant....during a recession.

Viewing 1 - 3 of 140 Reviews

Glassdoor has 161 NESTA reviews submitted anonymously by NESTA employees. Read employee reviews and ratings on Glassdoor to decide if NESTA is right for you.