Ventajas
Free food if your lunch break aligns with canteen opening times. Free broadband and phone line rental. Free parking in secured underground or external car park. Motorcyclists are lowest priority though. There is a cycle cage in the car park for securely storing bicycles, with a repair/maintenance stand inside of it. Corporate discounts for things like cinema tickets/passes, tasteclub card, holiday vouchers, experience days etc. Option to buy things (technology, bicycles, holidays etc.) out of pre-tax wage and pay over the course of 1 or 2 years to get the item at a lower price through tax savings. SOME of the staff are nice people and become like family, if you're lucky enough to get to know them. SOME of the shifts have a great work-life balance; there's a shift pattern where you work three 12-hour shifts a week (either Fri/Sat/Sun or Wed/Sat/Sun) and a shift where you work four 10-hour shifts a week. Both of those shifts give you plenty of time off but require a lot of focus and positivity to get through the working days.
Desventajas
The free food has been known to make people ill on countless occasions. I personally found mouldy cheese and mouldy bread buns there more than a few times, grey/spoiled ham and all kinds of other nasty stuff that would put people in hospital. 90% of the managers are brown-nosers and couldn't care less about their staff. The only culture celebrated there is that of brown-nosing to get places. Only two of the managers there are decent, caring and hard-working people that actually go out of their way to help staff. The upper management as a whole don't recognise hard work, they only see numbers. That trickles down into the behaviour of team managers trying to keep their jobs. This means that people abusing and cheating the system are rewarded, while those picking up the slack BECAUSE of the cheaters are left being penalised and told they're not doing well enough compared to the cheaters. The environment is toxic because the managers more often than not don't know the employment laws/workers' rights and don't like being told that they're not allowed to do x, y, or z, and they will fight you all the way until you threaten them with a tribunal. The senior management are often made aware of changes that need to be made to processes and policies to streamline or improve service experience for both customer and colleague, but will completely refuse to even consider making the necessary change. When things go wrong or something stops working, you're expected to just wing it and pretend like nothing is wrong or that it's not Plusnet's fault. The managers will often promise to help people out with career progression, the company will promise to help people through education by being flexible with shifts or allowing a change of shift but then deny ever having offered assistance. They will claim that your obligation is to them because you signed the contract with them before you went into higher education, they'll refuse to move you into other areas of business or offer you a shadowing experience to help you progress because of some arbitrary and unrelated reason. I've seen it all happen to different colleagues who were doing perfectly fine in their roles. The upper management don't want people progressing or moving to better roles, because that means more hiring and training involved to replace you, so they'd rather force you to stagnate and ignore you and the toxic environment that this creates. They aren't doing anything to combat the haemorrhaging of experienced and knowledgeable staff, which is causing an environment where nobody knows what to do in half of the complex scenarios that need dealing with. They tend to hire management staff externally as opposed to advancing people internally, which leads to managers who don't know the role or the intricacies trying to tell those who do know it what they should be doing and how they're wrong. It's an awful place to work.