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Saje Natural Wellness

Engaged Employer

Saje Natural Wellness reviews

3.0

48% would recommend to a friend

(555 total reviews)

Barbara De Laere

37% approve of CEO

31% positive business outlook

Saje Natural Wellness has an employee rating of 3.0 out of 5 stars, based on 555 company reviews on Glassdoor which indicates that most employees have an average working experience there. The Saje Natural Wellness employee rating is in line with the average (within 1 standard deviation) for employers within the Retail and wholesale industry (3.5 stars).

Reviews by job title

555 reviews
2.0
Jul 19, 2018

This Ship is SINKING! Beware!!

Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Some like-minded people Well-meaning company mission 50% product discount Awesome community members Good intentions with culture focus Flexible work schedule for management Healthy lunches

Cons

Take a slow and close read of all the other reviews and you will notice an undeniable truth - there are systemic issues at play from the top-down and the Saje ship is sinking - sales are down, A Players are leaving for better gigs, and no one at the top is experienced enough in business or leadership to know what to actually do about it. Seems like retail leadership is crumbling with very few good people left at mid or senior levels, which should be raising alarm bells but isn’t - yikes! The primary issue is emotional and inexperienced decision making at exec and senior levels due to family & close family friends all at the top who haven’t actually been executives at other companies and therefore don’t have the depth of business acumen needed to make decisions. That, and they rely on a misinterpretation of spiritual laws (similar to hope and pray) instead of real forward strategic thinking. Heavy reliance on topgrading people but lack of organized thinking on how to actually stimulate and grow true A Players. Probably the hardest and saddest to stomach is the founding family’s enormous ego - the spiritual laws are aspirational for them and you can easily see they don’t know the faintest thing about non-attachment and being ego-less. The day they actually understand these concepts the ship may turn around, as they may let go of their attachment to old ways of thinking and let others make some big bold new decisions! Let’s hope!

2.0
Feb 5, 2018

Head Office: An okay work environment but unstable

Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

- vegan lunches provided daily by in-house chef - mostly female co-workers & female CEO = girl power - beautiful office space - outdoor patio space for eating lunches - new office space off Main st in construction - 50% staff discount - bonus incentive if company reaches 90% of quarterly goal (I have yet to experience this benefit as the company has not been making goals in the past year) - 'Fresh Air Fridays' give employees the option to work from home on Friday's (but be prepared to spend approx 9 - 10hr workdays most other days of the week. While working through your lunch break and eating at your desk)

Cons

- Saje is a self-proclaimed 'Wellness Company' but your wellness is not their top priority. Making money is their top priority. Expect to work 9 - 10hr days, sitting through your lunch hour at your computer desk. If you are ill with the flu, you are still expected to bring your laptop home and work from home. My stress, anxiety, and depression levels have skyrocketed since I've started working at Saje (I believe stress-based. At my point of burning out) - job stability feels shaky (people are 'let go' aka fired and it is brushed under the carpet) The common excuse is, "they were not in their dharma / not a good fit". This excuse has been used too many times now and it feels ungenuine. I personally believe that the company is not making enough money and this is a way of budget-cutting: mass firing but trying to keep it a secret. I know that myself and other fellow employees I've talked to feel like we could be 'let go' any day without warning. Thus, most people are on the look-out for other career opportunities with other companies. - I have lost multiple friends/co-workers to the company secretly firing them. With no good reason for it except that they were not in their 'dharma'. I don't know much about the legal part of hiring/firing, but doesn't that sound somewhat illegal? Shouldn't a company have adequate reasoning to fire a faithful employee? I hear they were offered an ok severance package though. - company culture is cult-like (if you know anything about Lululemon company culture, Saje's culture is x1000 more intense) You can view this as a good thing, but you can also view this as a way of typecasting your employees. Saje uses a personality tool call The Enneagram, each individual chooses a number based on their personality (ex. 8's are outgoing, 4's are romantic artists, etc) but I find that the Enneagram is often used as a tool for discrimination - you become locked to that personality type and people assume parts of your personality and how you will react to situations based on it! - every morning you are expected to 'check-in' publicly to your larger team (aka marketing team, or product team, or accounting team) and tell everyone how you are feeling that day on a scale of 1-10. So if you are going through some personal issues or just feeling down, you would check in at a 7ish. However, at Saje, most people put on a mask and always check in at an 9 - 10 every day. - You are expected to always be happy, always be on your A-game, always be self developing, and moving the company forward, etc, etc. It can get exhausting. - One of our co-workers quit last year because she was being bullied by her manager. In her exit interview, she explained this to HR, but they did nothing about it. This manager continues to harass their team. This is devastating to that team's morale.

1.0
May 26, 2018
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

The public doesn't seem to be aware of all of the bad employee experiences yet. Rumor has it Saje is really good at keeping people quiet when they leave, whether the quit or are fired. So it still looks good on a resume since they keep their image up, so that is a pro.

Cons

The other bad reviews on here took the words right out of my mouth. This company positions themselves to be all about wellness, but the employee experience has really gone downhill recently. These review show the way their staff feel about how true that culture of wellness is. First, I just want to mention that this is one of the worst benefits packages I have had in all of my full time jobs. You would think a wellness company would want to fork out a little more money so that their employees have things like direct billing and more than 50% coverage on most things. They seem to have dumped a lot of money into opening new stores in the USA, and now their Canadian teams that have been making good money for them and paying for that expansion are the ones feeling the consequences of their bad financial planning. And you should hear the stories from the USA stores. The store managers get to meet once a year and the Americans have some real stories to tell! Lots of them opened without staff and the store managers at some store were working 12 or 14 hours days for weeks! If they couldn't even plan for their new store openings, how can I expect that they are planning smart for the long term? It's a big concern for me. At my store, traffic is way down and we are no longer able to make our stores sales goals and we all feel on edge because of it. So many people are leaving without explanation or being let go left right and center that nobody thinks they are safe. Its a toxic environment. For months and months the sales goals were raised to ridiculous heights to try to make up the money they have lost, and it has been really discouraging to all of us who work so hard just to feel like we are failing. They keep firing important positions like regional directors and directors of operations and directors of HR that over time has made everyone feel really nervous about what the heck they are doing. They keep acting like they're restructuring and making a new plan and it happens so much that even part time employees think they are flying by the seat of their pants. On top of that, for store managers, they have done major budget cuts on labor. Most store managers had to reduce their team members hours because of the labor budget cuts lots of great people quit because of it. This happened right before and over the holiday season! Store managers were left with less people on their teams, less hours to schedule those people and higher goals to try to reach with way less people. There have been days where the labor budget gives store managers less hours to schedule than their store is open! Here, have 9 hours to schedule employees on a day when your store is open 12 hours. Good luck! And when you tell them that's not enough hours, they tell you to borrow hours from another day... so then you take hours from your busy days like Saturday and Sunday, because those are the days where they actually gave you a few more hours. But then you have less people to try to make goal on the one day a week when you actually have a chance to make goal...... And we're a wellness company so don't get stressed about it! And right when all the store managers were getting stressed out over the sales goals, a bunch of us were approached by one of the CEOs, Jeanpierre, to sign up for his other company's "life coaching"... this feels like a scam. He offered a "deal" to pay for a portion of the coaching and offered to "conveniently" just take the monthly payment off of my paycheck. So they asked a bunch of their store managers to take a pay cut to get "coached" by someone who is younger than them in some cases, and who doesnt even have any kind of real credentials in coaching (except that they were taught in his own coaching system). I think only one of the coaches in the program actually has some kind of degree or accreditation for legitimate business or life coaching. Jeanpierre openly talks about his coaching business "saving" Saje in the past. It sounds like he is trying to do it again and he is getting the money from his own staff to save the business. I won't say if I signed up or not because I dont know how many people did or did not and I want this to be anonymous. If you are applying for the "company culture" think twice. If your job isn't in Vancouver, you're probably going to be an after thought. They get the good parties and the Vancouver stores get approved for way more events and they get way more communication from the higher ups. Everyone else is just expected to keep grinding. Another part of the culture that feels like a lie is the "growth" culture. They talk about growth like its some big pillar that they revolve their business around but there are so many store managers who have carrots dangled in front of their noses for months or years with promises of promotions that never come. Many of my friends that I met at Saje have gone on to way better positions with other companies. Saje is turning itself into a stepping stone for people to get hired by better retailers. There are also some store managers who finally got promotions with Saje and then had them taken away when all of those budget cuts happened. Those people left. I don't know if they quit themselves or were let go when the budget cuts happened because it all happened quietly. And they are now terrified to talk about it so us current employees may never know what happened. I go to work stressed out every day. Am I going to be next? You never know if your job is in danger when you're not making your goals. It's all about the money these days. I wanted to share this while I still count as a current employee since its easy to assume that former employee reviews are only negative because they are disgruntled. Dont assume that about this company. The people here have given really honest reviews. I may work in a store but I can even realate to many of the things that the head office reviews here have said.

Viewing 1 - 3 of 555 Reviews

Glassdoor has 596 Saje Natural Wellness reviews submitted anonymously by Saje Natural Wellness employees. Read employee reviews and ratings on Glassdoor to decide if Saje Natural Wellness is right for you.