9mo
Thank you for your review. You’ve added a few points here, so I want to make sure I cover everything off, please bear with my long answer.
We have, in recent years, boosted our company events to allow people who don’t normally work together time to interact. With a hybrid working policy in place, some teams don’t meet in the office as often as they would have done prior to this, so this ensures they get time to interact.
I’m sorry you didn’t get on with your colleagues, the office can be quieter some days than others, depending on the number of people in.
We have a policy called “escalation” which allows all staff to understand their route to ask questions or raise concerns, so if you are not getting what you need from your day-to-day activities, then you always know where to go next. We ensure that this is covered in your first few weeks so all our new people can get the help and support they need during their onboarding.
Each team has a grading structure, allowing you to progress through them as you learn more about the role, and this equates to increases in your pay. Ultimately, this enables someone to become a senior member of the technical services team. However, there are opportunities to move to other roles, and most of our management roles have been through internal promotion. We are continually looking at ways to progress our internal talent into more fulfilling roles that meet their career objectives, where possible.
The pay structures mentioned above are not at a fixed time period and will progress in line with your development, so are not fixed at 2 years, for example.
We have many benefits to the role, including a generous pension scheme, cash plan, paid wellbeing time and many more… Yes, we do have branded, named mugs, which is great as you always know which one is yours! But if you don’t want to use it with the tea and coffee options provided, that’s OK too.
The training you mention is an interesting point, and this ties into your comment about the role not being transferrable. The system you learn in this role is completely bespoke to Synertec and won’t be anything you’ve learnt elsewhere. Essentially, it’s like learning a new bespoke programming language. Therefore, when we advertise for a role we need to equate what we do with something that will attract candidates who will have an affinity with the work we do; however, this is fully explained in both the job description that accompanies the advertisement and also is fully discussed in the interview – we don’t want any surprises on day 1, that doesn’t work for either party. You will develop your problem solving skills, communication and customer support skills within a technical environment, which are skills not unique to Synertec, We get feedback from our people to say they appreciate the opportunity to make a difference to their customers, particularly the NHS, so I would hope that they don’t feel the role is “useless”.
So this brings me to the training; we must therefore train all new technical services consultants to fully understand the intricacies of our software. There may be functionality that we teach that is only used by some customers, and you may not have had the opportunity to work with those customers in your short tenure, hence why there is the feeling that you were being taught things you never used. We recognise that there is a lot to learn and are in the process of implementing improvements to our training programme in both technical services and for all new starters.
Finally, we have in place support for mental health issues, including being accredited to ISO45003. Our group of mental health first aiders are available to help and signpost you to any services you may need and are all super approachable. We also have two different options for free 3rd party support services, as part of our wider benefits package. Pressure is a good thing in a working environment, and we recognise that some people thrive on more pressure than others, which is why we encourage our managers to have 1-2-1 meetings with their staff where there is an opportunity to have an open and honest 2-way conversation (in line with our brand values), to tackle any issues and offer solutions before pressure becomes stress.
