People who work for E.ON energy, what advice can you give to someone who works for the company they just bought out?
Posted by Infamous-Computer880@reddit | AskUK | View on Reddit | 14 comments
Basically in the title, I work for OVO energy. We’re all sitting terrified, feels like no information is being passed on to us and we’re worried about job security and our WFH model being kept in place.
Any tips we should know about? What systems do you use or what’s the policy for working from home?
Literally anything will calm us right now, thanks.
HeWhoHasABeard@reddit
System is kraken. Same as octopus. Can be a bit slow but it does the job
Work from home policy differs a bit by team/site but worse I’ve seen it’s 2 days a day in the office
Some managers are quite relaxed on work from home though. For example I go in one day a week and head home on my dinner for childcare requirements
Infamous-Computer880@reddit (OP)
Thanks so much for replying! Just wanted to check though because our manager just told us we won’t have to switch, we use kaluza and apparently there’s no plan to retrain anyone from OVO, have you heard anything about it?
HeWhoHasABeard@reddit
Our comms says they will assess the 2 systems before deciding which to use
From a business perspective surely keeping kraken would make most sense as already in the main business and technically already has more customers on it so less to migrate but who knows
Standard-Spite-6885@reddit
Keeping kraken would likely make the most sense, as kaluza is still in relatively new use at OVO and had a bunch of problems that weren't fixed anyway
nathderbyshire@reddit
Eon went all into WFH after COVID when they realised how much money they'd save on offices, the one I work at is still empty to this day, I don't think it's ever been filled and it's been over 6 years now. Their idea at least at the time, not sure if they executed it correctly was to have everyone WFH and have hubs setup across the country for people to work in when they're not at home as opposed to running big offices with 5 staff in.
It'll take months at least, you probably do have some time to think about what you want to do.
When they took over npower and then moved to Next, around 1000 workers from both sides were being cut and if they didn't get enough volunteers to take redundancy they started doing it manually, using metrics like performance, time there and sickness to determine your viability, they look at this when you applied to next as a new company, if you didn't get the job you were let go before the company was shut down, unless they were using you before throwing you out to transfer npower customers.
Infamous-Computer880@reddit (OP)
If you don’t kind me asking, what systems do you use? We are run off HP laptops an have an extra screens, would be nice to hear if you guys use Apple 😂
nathderbyshire@reddit
Horrid ones, it could be much better now though. Since they dumped their system and took over Kraken most of its web based afaik, who knows you might get a Chromebook.
They did revamp the tech while I was there, while simultaneously blaming me for excel not opening which was quite important to the job and they finally got sick of the complaints and started upgrading tech, but they were also kinda forced by the shutdown of windows 10, so who knows if they would have done it had windows 10 continued.
They switched to miniPCs and dual screens which were actually really nice to use, but some people had laptops as well
pointlesstips@reddit
Who would've thunk that all of the invoice writers would consolidate after all. It's almost as if privatisation didn't add any value.
sunheadeddeity@reddit
Read up on TUPE regulations, get hold of your company's and E.ON's redundancy policies and read them, join a union.
Infamous-Computer880@reddit (OP)
Literally first thing I done yesterday was join Unison, had a bad feeling about it.
Only been there since September so worried about being out a job. Don’t think I’d qualify for redundancy but it’s mostly the work from home model I’m worried about, we all rely on that for our circumstances at home and I can feel it’s about to get ripped away from us.
I’ll defo read up on it thanks!
seriousrikk@reddit
Does your contract state you are a home worker?
Infamous-Computer880@reddit (OP)
Technically no, but I do two days per month in office, most groups do. Manager isn’t too fused if we can’t make it in, we’re classed as hybrid worked who need to commit to two days per month. There are people in our group who are specifically WFH staff, they live too far out to travel to an office hub.
Minimum_Airline3657@reddit
So ur telling me ovo bought SSE and now e.on have just bought ovo lol some money shenanigans going on there.
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