Checkout.com

• Decent pay, probably because they're struggling to hire and retain staff.
• Some teams do have genuinely nice people, although they're probably looking to leave.
• Decent breakfast for free.
• Tech is at a decent standard, using a lot of the latest stuff, and a lot of stuff is greenfield.

RTO policy: 3 days in the office mandated. This is tracked on a team level, so you and/or your team manager will have to deal with the consequences if one person in the team brings the percentage down. The leadership team has clearly said, "If you do not like this policy, please leave the company," which speaks volumes about the attitude of leadership towards their employees. Additionally, this is always framed in such a way that if there are further questions about this, expect to pack your bags and leave.

This is said to be done to encourage collaboration, but everybody knows it's to enable micromanagement. This is without doubt a reason that attrition is so high.

There is free lunch; however, most of the time it just tends to be a box with cold meat and salad. The best option is hard to get as it goes very quickly. Instead of splitting this across floors, for some reason, this is kept on one floor, which forms lots of queues and traffic at lunchtime.

Forget about being promoted and decent pay raises. Typically, pay raises are below inflation level, and promotions are quite hard to come by unless you're loved by management, regardless of performance.

So-called 'personal goals' are just a way of making employees do more work for the business for free or outside of working hours.

Regular changes bring uncertainty and constant change in direction. The leadership cannot decide to stick with one direction. Sometimes, due to these changes, your role may change with additional responsibility without the additional pay or even a more senior tag.

Employees are just really treated as pawns. If you care about being treated nicely at work, forget Checkout. You will just be another number on a spreadsheet.

Since office days are Tuesday, Wednesday & Thursday, if you decide to take annual leave on either of these three days and work on Monday & Friday, expect some questions and challenges from management. It is usually granted (because they're required to by law), but can be questioned.

• Listen to your employees, not the feedback that they're forced to give to appease management, but instead real feedback that the majority of staff holds back due to fear from management.

Checkout seriously needs a company-wide anonymous survey where employees can be open and honest about their opinions and actually act upon the results.

• Stop tracking people coming into the office. This is childish and intrusive. The fact that this is being done at a team level makes even less sense.

• Stop living in the 90s and force people to come into the office like primary school children. Stop being so obsessed with making people come into the office. For some roles, being in a noisy office means being less productive. Your culture and motivation in staff will almost instantly improve if you let people choose when and how often they come in. Measure success based on output and productivity instead of where people are working from.

• To the leadership team: drop the attitude. Telling people publicly that they should leave if they don't like some things that you could easily be flexible on is very arrogant. The Q&A just comes across as a publicity stunt, especially after the anonymity factor was eliminated.