OLIO Reviews
93% would recommend to a friend
(48 total reviews)
Tessa Clarke
93% approve of CEO
Found 48 of over 55 reviews
Updated 15 Aug 2023
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Top Review Highlights by Sentiment
Excerpts from user reviews, not authored by Glassdoor
- "Unlimited holiday Work life balance encouraged with flexible working hours & locations Amazing colleagues and team culture Promotions internally" (in 7 reviews)
- 5.015 Aug 2023Account ExecutiveFormer Employee, more than 1 yearLondon, England
Pros
Great Company Values and team
Cons
The job setting is remote only.
- 5.016 Jun 2023Senior Account ManagerCurrent Employee, more than 1 yearLondon, England
Pros
Unlimited holiday Work life balance encouraged with flexible working hours & locations Amazing colleagues and team culture Promotions internally
Cons
Uncertainty of future (like in any start up)
OLIO Response6moThank you so much for your feedback! 😊
- 5.018 Apr 2023Anonymous EmployeeCurrent Employee, more than 3 years
Pros
Really clear mission that we're all working towards, matched by the wonderful team who are all really driven by that mission. Company culture is excellent and inclusive. Very flexible working style and great perks.
Cons
No massive cons - remote working can be lonely sometimes, but we have great co-working options
OLIO Response6moThank you so much for your feedback! 😊
- 5.013 Jun 2022Software EngineerCurrent Employee, less than 1 year
Pros
I absolutely love working here. This company somehow managed to attract really intelligent and kind people, and I've been learning lots in my time here so far while feeling really safe and supported. In my team specifically, I found the team to be really open to change and any suggestions I made were listened to and often accepted easily, which I was really happy about. I am also surrounded by engineers who clearly care about the product and the software quality, which keeps my levels of motivation at high levels. Also, I'm happy to finally work in a tech team that isn't just made of men. I think the tech team is mostly non-male which is great.
Cons
None (can't think of any)
2 - 5.05 Apr 2022Software EngineerCurrent Employee, less than 1 yearLondon, England
Pros
OLIO is one of the best companies I have ever worked at. Despite being a remote-first company, I always feel very connected to both my immediate colleagues and to the rest of the company. Our flexible working policy is truly flexible, and I always feel like OLIO truly cares about me, my mental wellbeing, and my career progression. It is a pleasure to work alongside a team of such talented, caring, and mission-driven individuals.
Cons
We’re going through a lot of change at the moment which can be overwhelming at times. Also, it’s a minor point, but it would also be great if our employer pension contributions were a bit more than the legally required minimum!
4 - 1.025 May 2022Anonymous EmployeeCurrent Employee
Pros
Unlimited holiday's, fully remote working, pension.
Cons
Don’t believe what you see on the surface of OLIO, it is designed to pull the wool over your eyes to make you believe they are the best company in the world but they are very far from it. The management here are an absolute joke, people promoted internally who have been at OLIO for their entire careers and act like they are above everyone else and don’t like to be challenged because they have massive egos, shoot your ideas and suggestions down at every turn to make themselves feel special, and there’s nothing you can do about it. Developing an app for years that has no sense of direction, does not even have any form of backlog of work, so features just get thought up on the spot and ultimately delivered and then reverted 6 months down the line. Most of the positive reviews that are left are prompted by the management at OLIO, essentially begging for reviews to be left so they can appear to be amazing. They essentially force people into coming to OLIO events, in which you are recorded 24/7 from morning until night, forced into doing various activities so they can use it as marketing material without your consent. So whilst the videos seem to appear very happy, behind the scenes you have a lot of people who have various anxiety issues who are forced into coming and being recorded and have to be sent home because the “events” are too much. There’s no progression at OLIO as they seem to be so desperate for outside council, they simply can’t hire internally because they have absolutely no idea what they are doing, so hire outside of the company in hopes that somebody will provide some actual direction to the company. They seem to hire based off if you fit their core values, and not if you can actually do the job, so they have essentially ended up with a group of people who probably aren’t the best fit to develop such a product, and as so it has suffered to the point where they have to charge people to use a google map on the app. I assume this would be on the basis that you are willing to do whatever OLIO asks of you rather than objecting to their many frankly obsessively wrong practices. If you want to be micromanaged, belittled and passive aggressively bullied to the point you turn into a shrivelling husk then apply away.
12OLIO Response2yHi, this is Tessa (OLIO’s co-founder & CEO for those of you reading this who aren’t from OLIO). I’m absolutely devastated by this review. I’d really appreciate it if you could book some time with me during my Founders 15 (time Saasha and I set aside for anyone in the company to chat with us 1:1 every Friday). Or if you prefer, please do reach out to Thaisa, our People & Culture Director. It sounds like you’re extremely unhappy and life is far too short and precious to not be enjoying your job, so I’d love to do what I can to help get this resolved! In the meantime, here’s a response to some of your points: Perhaps it hasn’t been clear to you (that’s on me), but from launch to now we’ve been firmly in ‘experimentation’ mode as an early stage startup that’s trying to do something really tricky (change consumer behaviour). That means that we’ve been building product with a view to seeing what does and doesn’t move our North Star Metric (# listings coming onto the app). Inevitably some experiments have worked; others haven’t. As we enter the next stage of our growth which is all about focus, we’ll be stripping things out of the product that don’t work. This isn’t a failure, but rather a healthy thing to ensure our product doesn’t just ‘bloat’. We do have a backlog; a very extensive one, so I’m really surprised you don’t know about it! I’ll talk to the product & tech leaders to see what we can do to ensure everyone is aware of the backlog, in a way that’s useful As part of growing our tech team from ~10 people to on our way to 30+ people over the past 12 months we’ve promoted a couple of our existing team members; and we have recruited new leadership talent that has experience of this stage of growth. I’m very sorry to hear that you think one/some of our internal hires have been over promoted. We do a bi-annual 360 performance review process for everyone, so if you haven’t been able to give feedback prior to that, I’d strongly encourage you to use this as a vehicle for that. We haven’t yet developed a clear career progression framework, but that’s next on the list for our brand new People & Culture team, once they’ve implemented our new HR Information System, and Applicant Tracking System which are our current pain points. They will be starting to develop a career development framework with the Tech team first. To help people reach their career goals (whatever they might be), every person at OLIO has a Personal Development Plan (PDP) which they create the first time they go through our bi-annual performance review process, and you’re responsible for updating it at each review thereafter. This helps us support people in reaching their career aspirations. If you haven’t got a PDP, please reach out to your manager. We do have a very diverse team, and in our tech team in particular. We’re absolutely thrilled by this as ‘inclusive’ is our #1 company value so it's something we work hard at (although of course we can always be better). You mention team mates with anxiety in particular, and that was one of the main reasons we recently rolled out the Inside Out service to everyone in the company which provides access to 1:1 counselling and also helpful tutorial materials too. We’ve also kickstarted some D&I training that’s available to everyone in the company. As far as I’m aware we have *never* forced someone to attend an event, or take part in sessions if they let us know it would be uncomfortable for them. In fact I personally know of several instances in the past when someone has chatted to us about not wanting to attend, and they haven’t, and that’s been absolutely fine. We try to ensure that in-person events work as well as possible for all sorts of people, (including accommodating those who want to opt out of optional activities) although this is of course still a learning curve, and something we will get better at with more feedback and more experience. For all of our events which we record we share in advance that recordings will take place, ask the team for their permission allowing people to opt out, and also ask again that everyone is comfortable before publishing the final version. We are very supportive of anyone who wishes to opt out (either from the start, or after filming has taken place). If you feel that you’ve not had the opportunity to say this please do let me or your SLT member know. As we’ve been on a massive recruitment drive recently, and we know how important Glassdoor is, we absolutely have asked the team to leave a review if they would like (mentioned on the company call; followed up with an email to all). There was nothing untoward about this, especially as Glassdoor is anonymous so there’s no way to know who has and hasn’t left a review anyway. I could be wrong, but I suspect that those who have left a review may feel upset by your suggestion that they did so under duress, or that what they wrote isn’t true :( As part of my induction that I do with everyone who joins OLIO, I spend some time on one slide in particular which is all about the importance of speaking your mind, and healthy debate/conflict. I’m sorry to hear that you don’t feel this is the case. I will raise this (again) in our SLT meeting on Monday. With regards to the map view as part of the Supporter package, that was deliberately an MVP approach, and (as we suspected) we have found that OLIOers become Supporters because they support our mission first and foremost, rather than for the map view. Our conversion rates to Supporter are bang on industry average and through the rest of the year we will be continuing to improve this. This is another example of where it seems like perhaps you’re not familiar with the strategy behind why we’re doing some things in product - we have the AMA feature where you can direct a question to me/Saasha/any SLT member, and I’d strongly encourage you to use that to get the answers to these sorts of questions if you’re not sure why we’re doing something. Or of course, please do ask your line manager too! I am *extremely* concerned to hear you say that you feel micro-managed and belittled. This is absolutely NOT what we want, and isn’t at all in keeping with our #3 company value which is ‘caring’. I would strongly encourage you to please speak to your line manager, the line manager of whoever is treating you this way, our People & Culture team or myself to get this resolved right away. I would also hope that you have tried to give this person some feedback as in my experience, people can often be shocked and unaware of the impact their behaviour is having on others. But if they aren’t told, they will never know Finally, if you haven’t already, please can you make sure to give this feedback in the Employee Satisfaction Survey which is currently out with everybody? We run this 2x per year and it’s a really important channel for us to get feedback about things that can be better, and hopefully there you can give a few more specifics so we can solve the root cause of some of these issues. Thanks!
- 5.013 Jun 2022Head of Business DevelopmentCurrent Employee, more than 3 yearsLondon, England
Pros
I love working at OLIO. What we're doing is important, innovative, and the culture is one where everyone is well-looked after and treated like an adult. It's the best job I've ever had!
Cons
The fast pace of a startup isn't for everyone
1 - 1.03 Feb 2022Food Waste HeroFormer Employee, more than 3 years
Pros
You can get free food, BUT see the cons below
Cons
Olio would hardly respond to you via emails and if they do, they would be delayed a lot (caliber of weeks and months). They would warn you for something you did not know about rather than informing you politely. They would warn you for something, like a missed collection, but they would sanction you with much higher caliber. They literally make a living off free volunteers' effort. This is not a charity. This is a profit oriented business, which breaks the idea of humanitarian efforts for reducing food waste. Charity over business anytime. I do not find them moral and ethical anymore.
3OLIO Response2yHi there, We're really sorry that your treatment as a volunteer with OLIO has left you feeling upset. It seems like we need to improve our processes and transparency with regards to our volunteers. We do have a clear process that we show all volunteers in our FAQs (https://help.olioex.com/article/459-food-waste-hero-complaints-and-warnings) Did you see this already? With regards to OLIO being a charity. We tackle that head on in our FAQ (https://help.olioex.com/article/82-how-are-you-making-money) "Is OLIO a charity or a business?" We chose to set OLIO up as a business, not a charity. That’s because when we looked at organisations that had scaled to enormous impact very quickly, we saw hundreds of examples of businesses achieving this, but very few charities. We also believe that profit with purpose is how businesses must operate for there to be a fairer, more sustainable future for us all. So we want to help prove that profit with purpose (i.e. giving equal consideration to people & planet, as well as profit) is not only possible, but preferable to business-as-usual. " With regards to missing a collection - we do struggle with this because there are so many reasons why someone might miss a collection. The important thing for us is knowing that the next collection will be filled - otherwise, food goes to waste :( What we do right now takes a lot of work but we feel that doing the hard things right is the sign of a good company. If someone is reported to have missed a collection, we follow up asking for a reason. If the reason is justified, then we drop the issue. If the reason is not justified or we do not receive a response, we have to take quick action to let someone else take the slot. It would be great to understand if you feel that we followed this process. We are absolutely in awe of the effort that our volunteers put in to save food. We aim to have thorough and consistent processes so that the amazing effort put in is maintained across all our volunteers. Many thanks, Team OLIO
- 5.028 Feb 2022Business Development ManagerCurrent Employee
Pros
-Genuine care for staff's well being. Offer access to 121 coaching sessions via Inside Out, genuine respect for work/life balance, autonomy on calendar/flexible working -Mission obsessed which creates great team spirit - we're all working towards the same goal -Understand the importance of career development - provide regular performance reviews, clear paths for progression and support on how to develop skills -Sociable - despite being remote first, have managed to build a sociable team with regular online and offline socials
Cons
-Fast pace start environment can make it hard to focus at times
- 5.07 Mar 2022Customer Satisfaction AgentCurrent EmployeeLondon, England
Pros
The mission How inspiring the founders are How involved are the founders in the day-to-day The empathy and kindness of the whole team Ambition to grow and generate much more impact To be able to work in a company aligned to my purpose and to what really matters to me
Cons
Honestly, nothing. Maybe sometimes I feel it would be nice to have an office and work in person together with my team.
1
OLIO Reviews FAQs
OLIO has an overall rating of 4.7 out of 5, based on over 55 reviews left anonymously by employees. 93% of employees would recommend working at OLIO to a friend and 86% have a positive outlook for the business. This rating has improved by 4% over the last 12 months.
93% of OLIO employees would recommend working there to a friend based on Glassdoor reviews. Employees also rated OLIO 4.6 out of 5 for work life balance, 4.6 for culture and values and 4.3 for career opportunities.
