Pros
Team members are great to work with. Some really good and competent but overworked managers. Being surrounded by tech. Awesome showrooms. Nice facilities in most stores.
Cons
The company grows every year doing record numbers that they are so proud of. But the teams never get any bigger. With some teams even getting smaller. All the stores have less staff than they have ever had before. Management says over and over that they are hiring but the staff numbers never change. It takes months for them to hire just a single person and by that point multiple people leave. We are constantly running with the bare minimum team members. So much so that stores have to share staff. Team members who live on the east side will need to drive past 2 stores and head into the city to just to cover when one team member is away. Any given day you could be assigned to a different store. Of course they don't cover the cost of travel. It's just expected of you. You signed up to it. You should just do it because it's an honour to be given the opportunity. There has been a lack of staff for multiple years so it can be very difficult to take annual leave. It's 10 times worse if you are a team leader or manager. Everyone needs to put their leave in 6 months in advance and it has to be so overly planned because the teams run on skeleton staff. 1 person goes on leave and it cripples not just one but multiple teams. There are managers with hundreds of hours of annual leave who can't take it as the company can't afford them to be away. Which is incredible as upper management and the director always get plenty of leave including in blackout periods. Sick leave is constant across all stores yet management are oblivious to the fact that it's their working conditions. They just say we all need to take better care of ourselves completely unaware that they are making this work culture. The work life balance that they constantly drum on about is entirely their doing. Most people in sales work 6 days a week. They have talked about moving to a 5 day roster for years yet never actually did anything about it. They offer RDO days to team members after a year with the company but as they pay based upon the award minimum or just slightly above no one can actually afford to drop a shift a week or even a fortnight. So of course team members use up their personal leave just to get a break. For some its the only way they can actually get a day off without jumping through hoops. I have actually wanted to get sick just to be able to rest. Many people are exhausted and burned out and overwhelmed every single day. Feedback from employees and customers is completely ignored. We get Google reviews and complaints about stores being understaffed and slow service. Instead of hiring more staff they bring in a ticketing system to manage customers. Customers have complained for years about not being able to reach the stores on the phones. We have an overseas call center who were hired to answer phones. But as is normal in this company the call center team got given a whole bunch of other work to do. So it falls back on the stores to try and juggle walkin customers, phones, backend work, picking orders, warranties. And then we get chastised when the answer rate drops. We have a company slogan about working smarter not harder. But for a tech company we do everything the hard way. Everything is manual. You know that red flag you hear about in interviews when the hirer says "we wear a lots of hats". That's exactly what Scorptec does. You might get a contract that says a certain title. But you end up just having to do everything and your title means nothing. Technicians in branches are expected to do sales. Sales need to do tech, warehouse and warranty. Warehouse guys need to do sales. All team members in a branch need to learn all these skills to cover for each of the understaffed departments. But do they pay you when you have all these skills? Of course not. They pay based upon the award. Your job title just basically says what award you are on. It doesn't matter how well rounded you are as a team member you still get paid like you just joined the company. The company pays the minimum or just above but is surprised when team members after being overworked for years get the attitude to do the minimum or just above it. What do they expect? The company has both no measurement system or reward system for good work but still has high expectations. Most stores don't run on a KPI systen like other companys. Staff are just told to do more. Upper management don't have knowledge of the day to day duties so their expectations are high. They see one persons numbers in a different store or even a different state and compare everyone to that. Even though it's an IT company daily staff performance is tracked manually by the manager or the staff themselves. There are no bonuses. Staff discounts range from sometimes reasonable to minimal. The most you will get as a reward for doing a good job is a "well done" from your manager and maybe pizza or nandos for lunch as a team a couple of times a year. The management make it seem like there are career opportunities and progression but there simply isn't. You might be able to move from sales to tech after a couple of years. But the chances of actually being promoted is tiny. The only time it happens is when there is a staff shakeup and they need to appoint someone new. There are staff and now ex-staff who sat in limbo positions for years. The requirements are unreasonably high. It is not enough to simply do your job well. If there's something about your personality that doesn't fit with their image you won't even be considered. You have to be a yes man and just agree with everything they say and want you to do. Don't have an opinion or speak your mind. Just go with their vision. It is crazy as they have so few middle managers. There's ONE branch manager who has to manage THREE stores. And it's been like this for years. Its any wonder why the staff leave so oftne. Upper management constantly talk about how we are a family company. A family wouldn't treat their members like this. This is a miserable place to work a lot of the time. The only good thing are the other staff on the same level as you and some really good middle managers who you can tell care and believe in the company. But the upper management is so disconnected and in their own world that they simply don't get it. They just preach and correct people to seeing things their way. Scorptec has heaps of potential with a bright team of loyal people. Some are loyal to a fault. But management holds it back by overworking everyone, over expecting and under delivering on their own promises. This company would be so much bigger than it is if they just hired enough people to do the work. But they won't and they are comfortable being this size.