Out of his depth CEO making terrible decisions - Anonymous employee Accurx Employee Review

1.0
3 May 2024
Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

The food is really great.

Cons

Be aware if you are Muslim or pro-Palestine, especially if you are on a visa: the recently hired COO, who spent eight years working for the Israeli Air Force, has a history of sharing Islamophobic social media posts on LinkedIn and Twitter. He has also liked posts celebrating the idea that people who go on Palestine marches should have their visas revoked. When his hiring was announced, a significant proportion of the company complained. The CEO defended his hiring on the grounds of “diversity of thought” and “meritocracy”. A few weeks later, the CEO announced the company was transitioning to a "high performing culture", in which people would be expected to work harder, performance reviews would be harsher, etc etc. He appears to be trying to replicate the culture of Amazon or Elon Musk. The recently submitted four or five star reviews of Accurx characterise people who have posted critical reviews in this way: “the last year has been full of change; some people here have struggled with that and developed a lot of resentment”. This is a misdiagnosis of why people are unhappy. People are unhappy not because of "change" in the abstract, but because of specific, indefensible decisions such as the hiring of the COO. There are many other bad things to convey, in particular about the CEO, who is out of his depth and cannot let go of micromanaging even the smallest detail - a culture that now permeates the organisation. But the most important thing I want to convey, so you are able to make informed decisions about your own safety, is the past behaviour of the COO and the fact that the CEO thought it was still both acceptable and a good idea to continue with his hire despite it.

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Accurx Response
2y
Thanks for taking time to provide feedback. As always it is useful for us to understand the thoughts and views of previous AccuFolk. However we would like to be clear that we are concerned about the sentiment you convey. Firstly, to address your reference to our high performance culture. We strongly believe the high performance principles we have shared with the company (examples being: working with urgency, being closer to our users, celebrating progress and succeeding together) will be instrumental in achieving our mission. In our view, the principles are not controversial and instead give us much needed focus for solving a big crisis for the NHS. We owe it to our users to do what we can to make sure we live up to our mission - We exist to bring patients and their healthcare teams together - to make patients healthier, staff happier, and the health system more efficient. Secondly and more seriously, we are concerned that the allegations you make here in the case of our COO are very serious and are without the full context that we have provided the company with internally. The result is that this review has created an unsafe situation that has required legal action. Whilst we completely appreciate this is your opinion, in the case of our COO we don’t agree with you. Our CEO very openly discussed our approach to hiring and the investigation we undertook to address the internal feedback surrounding Accufollk’s concerns. Our investigation was thorough and had input from neutral external parties. Our CEO offered to give more context to the decision either in person or through our anonymous channels. The individual in question has also addressed the whole team at another one of our company ceremonies since joining which has been well received by employees. As previously mentioned, we owe it to our users to focus on our mission and we need a diverse workforce that represents our healthcare system to do that. A diverse team means that we will have different views and opinions and might not agree on everything but it's important to us that Accurx remains a safe & inclusive place for all. We are very sorry that you feel this way about Accurx and that we can’t agree on your views. From, Accurx Team

Explore other reviews about Accurx

5.0
5 Nov 2023
Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Everyone at the company is very welcoming.

Cons

The hours can seem a bit long

1
4.0
11 Apr 2024
Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

The tech makes a genuine, tangible, positive impact for people working in the NHS. It's built to solve user problems, not tick the buyer's boxes (and it's the user love that then 'sells' the product). We have close contact with our users so we get to see that impact first-hand. Good balance between start-up and established company - we have the scale, revenue and brand of an established business but there are still big, difficult, new problems to solve. Office is modern and informal, lunch is provided every day. Colleagues are smart, motivated and come from a broad range of backgrounds and previous experiences.

Cons

There has been a lot of change as the company navigates how to scale from a start up to a mature business, and this isn't always managed or communicated in the best way.

2
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Accurx Response
2y
Thank you for taking the time to provide your feedback. It’s great that you were able to see the positive impact we are having on the NHS, and our users, first hand. We’re very proud of our mission, our people and what we’re building together. We’re happy that you think the team is great! We agree that everyone here at Accurx is incredibly smart and motivated by the mission. We believe that a workplace benefits from having people from different backgrounds, especially given our mission and our users. As you’ve mentioned, we are in a period of scaling, and this includes our ways of working. We understand that we need to continue to iterate and tweak how we do things and learn from experience. We are committed to doing this - thanks again for taking the time to submit feedback!
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