Show Notes
Hello and welcome to the bottom up skills podcast. I'm
Mike Parsons the CEO of
Qualitance. And today we're continuing with Revolut. Yes, the FinTech giant, the neobank nemesis. We're you going to discuss Revolut people and culture approach here in 2021. Now the people and culture area for Revolut is probably the most significant area.
Of improvement. I'm afraid to say that the key executives keep on leaving and employee satisfaction is not tracking upwards. It's kind of down. So let's see if some of the new hybrid working and remote working and working abroad programs will give that employee culture that much needed [
00:01:00] boost. Okay. So the very recent news from Revolut is that they're going to allow its employees to work abroad for up to 60 days.
And they've totally embraced, uh, hybrid working. Um, think about this, uh, over 50% of their staff would like to work in a hybrid way. 36% actually want to work entirely remote and wait for this only 2% want to come into the office every day. And this is getting to be a big deal cause it's over 2000 people worldwide.
And, uh, there's some big things, uh, at stake here for Revolut. I think the working abroad really fits the product and where the company comes from. So I actually love this idea, I think is really, really powerful. Um, they are famous for making travel and international money transfers easy. So it seems only natural that the company would be kind of borderless in how it thinks [
00:02:00] about where and how the team can work from.
Not only working from home, but perhaps even working abroad. So I think this is a really interesting thing that could be great for the culture and as well, when you bundle in that hybrid working way, I think there's a chance that this could start to contribute to a higher employee satisfaction, but there's work to do.
Um, so what we have done is. As always, when we do our case studies, we actually dig into glass door and we have a look at seat. Well, what's really happening behind the scenes. Now it's not going to be the. Um, world's best way of reading the pulse and the culture of an organization you'd have to be working inside to truly know, but it's a pretty good indicator.
And I think we can get some directional ideas from this. So I want to take you through the [
00:03:00] basic numbers. For Revolut on Glassdoor. This is where all their employees give feedback and to do so I'm actually going to refer to the stats as they are right now. And I'm going to compare them with what they were a year ago.
So we went to glassdoor.com and we had a look at what employees. Past and present. I was saying about the organization and actually it was a pretty decent school. So we got 3.9 out of five stars overall for the company. And 71% would recommend and 81% approved of the CEO Nikolai . Well, let's fast forward to today.
Okay. So those numbers were from a year ago. Let's have a look at today and ouch. It's like all of the numbers are down. So, um, the overall rating of the company is down from 3.9 to 3.3. So that's a 15% drop. [
00:04:00] That's pretty big movement. Um, but the movement just gets. Bigger and to the downside recommendations down from 71 to 52%, that's a pretty big decline.
The biggest one is the approval of the CEO has plummeted down to 54% from what was 81% a year ago. This is really, um, surprising and pretty dramatic. Actually, when you think about a company, this size 2000 employees, um, of which there are five, almost 500 reviews. So this is a quarter of the entire sample.
So I think there's some big you're flashing lights here. There's flags, there's smoke signals coming out of here. Um, But let's look at what is it about this culture? That seems so tough. And look, I'm the first to [
00:05:00] admit, you know, culture it's really about, um, leadership and vision and how you behave the symbols inside of the company and how you design the systems to serve and empower your people.
That's for sure. I think there's a lot of patterns inside of the data on Glassdoor that reveal what it's like at Revolut super fast paced. This came up in 22 of the reviews and look, lots of smart people, lots of learning. In fact, the reference to smart people came up 18 times in different reviews, but the negative signals are much stronger.
Work-life balance looks really, really. Poor. A lot of people are complaining of working 12 to 15 hour workdays and doing some work on the weekend and these long hours. Um, I think it's starting to create some real doubt in the eyes of the [
00:06:00] employees. 20%, sorry, 20 of their reviews in the, um, the current Gusto talk about no one really caring.
And, um, this, this is just. Obviously, um, a call for help. Now you have to think to yourself, well, there were some signals of the pros and cons this time, last year. So nothing really has changed there. The signals are just getting stronger, so that shows a lack of change. So whatever changes have happened thus far I haven't worked.
And what I would offer you is that my deduction is that. With such a particular type of work style, how they think, how they work, the culture. I think their candidate screening is the problem. And what I mean by that is this is a pretty intense workplace and they should screen their candidates.
Accordingly. And so they're obviously [
00:07:00] not doing that because people are coming in and turning right back out again. There's a lot of commentary about people staying for a year and then jumping into other jobs. It's sort of a launchpad job. So there's some really big signals here. Um, and, um, whilst no company is perfect, um, it's going to be really interesting to see what Revolut can learn from this employee feedback and whether they can create a more balanced work-life that retains they're good people.
So will this working abroad, will this hybrid working model improve the employee satisfaction? That's what we have to find out. That is the question at hand. And my last thought here is that as the company grows, this challenge will become harder because the group of employees will be larger. The different marketplaces jurisdictions in which people are working will be more so [
00:08:00] when you're all, you know, when you're 20, 50 people in one office, ah, that one's pretty straightforward.
You can see everyone, you can just grab everyone and put them in a room. And, and really work on problems, however, this, and this is a great proxy to their overall company challenges. Can they scale, can they go from being really smart, uh, payment solution or really smart, uh, transfer international currency solution to being a proper bank?
Can they go from being big in UK? To being big globally. Can they, uh, have this really strong commitment amongst the founders and can that trickle down throughout the entire organization? Because right now they continue to lose key executives. Their global head of marketing just left their global head of growth, just left.
It keeps on happening. So. Lots of challenges and I'm not betting against Revolut far from it [
00:09:00] because we know that they've got a great product. They, we know they're onto something, but if they want to realize their vision, which is to be a global financial app, it's not only the product that needs to be good.
They need to have a viable business model. So they got to make freemium work. They've got to actually have a brand that builds trust and people recognize huge amount of work to do there. And lastly, as we look at all of this, they've got to have a great culture. They've got to nourish their employees and keep that talent, grow that talent.
So. Let's see if they can do it. Meanwhile, if you want to learn how to build great teams or build great products, just head over to bottom-up dot IO, we've got a ton of free masterclasses. Try them, enjoy them. It's all open source. Go for it because we want you to be a better product person. All right.
That's it for the bottom-up skills podcast. That's a wrap. [
00:10:00]