Civica reviews

Civica should be seen as a cautionary tale of how an amazing workplace culture, built up through years of great leadership, can suddenly come crashing down. For well over two decades, Civica was a fantastic place to work, with a friendly, supportive culture, great people and a real passion for public sector customers. Senior managers were respected and they in turn treated employees with respect. Things took a sharp turn about two years ago, following a shake-up in the senior management team. A down-to-Earth, plain-speaking, customer-centric culture gave way to empty meaningless slogans like ‘GovTech Champion’ and ‘Winning Today’, which everyone is now expected to parrot to increasingly confused customers. On top of all this, endless ill-thought through restructures and large-scale redundancies have basically hollowed out the company and zapped morale for those who have kept their heads down and soldiered on. Civica used to have a genuinely open culture of communication with employees, with regular ENPS surveys, but this all ground to a halt. The prevailing management ethos has become increasingly masculine and ‘blokeish’, with nasty, degrading behaviour, which wouldn’t be out of place in a 1980s office, now a lot more commonplace.

Restructure, restructure, restructure, restructure - it keeps on going. It is relentless, brutal and short sighted. In my opinion there is very little integrity left within the business. At one time the Civica motto was "knowledge, integrity, action" that seems to have been consigned to history. It is routine to try and maximise revenue by imposing price increases that are way beyond what is permitted within the contract, manipulate wording on invoices and other "sharp practices". In a sales role where ongoing, long lasting relationships with customers are critical, I became embarrassed to work for this employer because of the continual drop in service, drop in support for customers, removal of critical expertise from the business, lack of product development and constant price hikes. Ultimately I left because I didn't want my personal reputation and integrity to be damaged by association with Civica. The situation now exists where the internal knowledge of some of Civica's own products is so low that it can no longer support the applications it has sold. Yet, the business continues to increase the support prices! All this is extremely bad for the customer and bad for the remaining staff.