team leader

customer service representative

client advisor

manager

public policy consultant

Stepchange-Debt-Charity

I worked at StepChange for 3 years. In that time I watched the business devolve into a nightmare. Every single colleague (including management) were looking for an out, however it is difficult to find similar work so they feel trapped.

Regardless of your ability or willingness to work hard, regardless of your conscientious motivations or how well you get on with people in general, the management do not understand the role therefore you will not be recognised for your strangths, effort or attitude and will be punished for things which: did not actually happen or have been utterly misinterpreted by your superiors who are not aware of what the role entails and the critical nuances therein. 

Regardless of your real performance, you will have constant meetings to discuss subjective opinions of your calls and general spiritual floggings, where you have been deemed to have done somethig 'wrong' while the person who has your neck has no idea what they are talking about. The facts are not takien into account, understood or defined and there is no middle ground or room for reasonable explanation or debate. This is as politely as I can put it.

This is a problem for the strong willed who have the courage to speak out, those who are then set aside, flagged by middle managers, earmarked for the harshest treament and a steady, ruthless character assasination. To be not only an example to others but also to remove the obstacle of sanity and hope before it infects the other captives. 

Having eventually been managed out they are then shamelessly denigrated in their absence as my friends were (whom the company told us not to contact but I did anyway - they were my friends. Shocked yet?) But I knew they were twisting it. As a side note, I left by choice but I know I would be forced eventually because I told the truth and had influence and the respect of my colleagues in the office. A terrible combination.

You will be smeared regardless of your behaviour. Even if you do nothing wrong, you will catch the drift that something has happened or something has been said even though you have done nothing wrong. But nothing will be said to you so you cannot fight for yourself and correct any fallacies.

You will be set targets which cannot be accomplished regardless of work ethic or talent. If you hit them, by the time you are measured, they will have changed and you will still somehow fall short. It's like whackamole.

You will eventually realise you are not in Kansas anymore and up is down. Then comes the exasperation and you understand why your colleagues eyes were like rabbits in headlights when you started.

Many, many colleague dissassociate themselves as they canot take the constant chaos, confusion and threatening atmosphere. The back stabbing, lack of respect and constant changing of your job without explanation or guidance. The feeling that the rug will be pulled out from under your feet any moment. It has it's toll and the reason depression is rife in the office is because people lose themselves since remaining present comes with it the ability to feel pain. So they understandably feel depressed (this will lift when you leave within a matter or weeks.)

As you sweat over things which don't make sense and a feeling of an invisible threat soaks into your daily working life you remember you have to pick up the phone now, having been wrongly told you are incapable of doing your job and resentful of your ill treatment, knowing at the other end of the line will be someone who really needs your help, may be suicidal or extremely offensive and aggressive. So you remember why to applied and motivate yourself again and again.

Ofcourse you treat them with the goodwill and patience which you were not afforded by those who should be looking out for and supporting you. You know you are doing a good job, for the right reasons and you keep doing a good job regardless because that is the right thing to do. 

There is no way to defend yourself, none.

Colleagues suddenly leave, often under a cloud of mystery, did they walk or were they forced? Who knows. The turnover is worse than any other call center. The monitoring of your calls, time and behaviour is dehumanising, beyond extreme and frankly- sick. I've worked for many call centers, some suppossedly 'the worst' in Leeds. No, they were a relative cakework.

Most shocking to me and a good impression of what you are dealing with is the reviews which are either 1 (real reviews) or 5 stars (guess who) for this company. Bizarre, dishonest, clearly an attempt to raise the score from the 1 star across the board it would otherwise be and clearly by existing management / marketing at the company. 

It really is 1 star, that is not hyperbole. Who really has an agenda against a debt charity? Look at the reviews. Either 1 or 5 stars, few inbetween. Which are real? Why would people want to warn you against this place if it really was 5 stars not 1 star? Wouldn't they encourage you to join?

Are they 'just bitter ex employees?' YES! Because what they are saying in their reviews is true! If you work here you become a bitter ex employee, or perhaps a rival debt charity is posting negative reviews over the last 5 years to attack the competition. No, they are just telling fibs to hide their shame.

It really is a dark and twisted environment in which the most resilient, thick skinned individual gets ground down by increments until they wonder if they are the one going crackers. 

I know this review seems over the top. It really was that bad and I feel I have to warn people about this place because especially with what is going on in the world, this environment is dangerous. But more than that, I am writing this for the good folk who work there on the phones.

To any current employees: please listen. The place is poison and since I left it becomes more clear by the day to me just how damaging it was to me. Until you can get out, remember it is just a job and you WILL get out and your old self will return like an old friend. You are not the problem, don't ever lose hope. You are a good person, why else would you want to help people. God bless x

Like repetitive work? Love impossible targets? Happy to have your every move monitored? Hate spending time with your family, kids or friends? If you answered yes to all these questions then this is definitely the place for you.

Don't be fooled by the charity status of this organisation. It is a call centre, pure and simple and is run as a very strict business that means you will be chained to your phone, sometimes for several hours in one go with clients, with limited breaks and respite (let's hope you have a strong bladder and little empathy for clients in very difficult and emotionally distressing circumstances!)

What the company fails to tell you before you start is that if the call goes past your contracted shift finishing time (which it frequently will) don't ever expect to be able to leave on time. You will have to stay on to finish the call with the client (calls with clients can last anywhere between 1 to 2 hours) as no, you can't pass your client on to another advisor working a later shift than you and it's your fault anyway because you're obviously taking too long with the client and you're to blame. Though you will accrue time off in lieu, this is incredibly difficult to quickly claim back when you actually need it.

Team leaders will pull you up on call duration times when you go over the accepted 58 minutes average and give little regard as to any extenuating circumstances that frequently occur and add on extra time to your call which you have no control over including: clients with severe depression/other mental health issues whom frequently burst into tears and need extra time to calm down in the session, having to abandon sessions to talk down suicidal callers from the edge, or clients who are woefully ill prepared to give you the basic, accurate information you need to do your job properly because they have no idea how much money they owe or to whom and you have to wait countless minutes for them to rustle around in the background opening letters from creditors.

Don't expect flexi-time and don't even think about asking to change your shift hours- there is no flexibility so i have no idea why other reviewers here have said there is great shift flexibility available? This is simply not true. You are only allowed one shift change request per year which can take the organisation up to three months to decide upon and even then can be refused.

Work with clients is repetitive and heavily scripted and read verbtim off computer screens. Most clients are absoloutely lovely and great to talk to. Unfortunately, you will frequently experience clients demanding a specific solution from you. They will then argue with you when you do not advise them of it because they actually don't qualify for that solution and you will be verbally abused and it will grind you down.

Calls will be regularly listened to which is good obviously for quality assurance purposes. However, even though you might have performed exceptionally well, you will always be made to feel that whatever you do is not good enough. You will receive weekly individual target feedback, have a weekly team feedback meeting, have monthly performance review sessions plus anything extra coaching sessions as determined by your team leader on top. This sounds positive but again, these meetings/feedback/sessions only serve to highlight what you are NOT doing in line with whatever the organisation's ever changing policy is that week and adds to the toxic atmosphere of the company grinding you down and you never being good enough.

 Ridiculous targets that you will be measured against include such gems like: the amount of full debt advice sessions you complete each week with clients. Sounds simple enough however, if you do not achieve these, you will be dragged over the coals, even when it is not your fault i.e. the clients mobile battery died, the signal cut out, clients mistakenly dialled the wrong number etc. But everything will be questioned!

As another previous reviewer aptly said, team leaders have the power to make or break you and they definitely do have their noticeable favourites in your team. There are some nicer team leaders who are a bit more understanding of the complete farce staff face each day but have little power to right this. However, there are some team leaders who are shockingly unprofessional and make their team members miserable and publicly slag off other employees in team meetings by criticising them for having the cheek to ask to 'try and finish their shift on time' to attend a pre-paid for event hours later that evening as, and I quote,  "if it was that important, they should have taken the whole day as annual leave". I kid you not. Employees should never be made to feel like they have to beg to be able to finish their day at the time legally stated on their contract nor that they are an inconvenience for wanting to leave on time as, you know, funnily enough, they have lives outside Stepchange and families and young children dependent on them too.

Finally, stepchange hire staff in large batches at a time due to high turnover. Within 7 months of starting at this job, 84% of staff in my batch had quit the job which speaks volumes! Dont be fooled by the hype and apply elsewhere.

Good “dead-end job” with a do as I say, not as I do approach to management.

Knowing people gets you places. Working hard gets you noticed, but doesn’t really help with self-development as your main job will be to answer the phone and be critiqued on everything from how long it took you to answer it, to how warmly you said hello but each time you receive feedback it can be different depending on who is giving it. 

It’s easy to do well, though, if you like helping people and keep working at it. It’s just a shame the place is run by the last people you’d expect to be running a charity…and there’s far too many managers and nobody knows what any of them do except make poor decisions and manipulate stats to make them look better!

Before I left I commented that they made something like 100 redundancies (I survived them unfortunately!) yet had moved into a pointless new building more befitting a corporate enterprise or a bank than a charity. 

The whole charity has become a vanity project for people in fancy suits that call themselves the senior leadership team. 

I enjoyed one of the four years I worked there, but got the feeling there was a glass ceiling for me.

Leaving was a blessing in disguise. Being there was a blessing as well in reality. I learnt how to deal with angry people effectively. I learned how saying yes can get you places fast if everyone else is saying no. I built confidence in the role dealing with some really difficult issue. It just left me with a bitter taste in the mouth at the end. It feels like it got too big for its own good and couldn’t handle it…but that’s the way they’ll go again.

This role will be okay for you if you’re naturally resilient because you’ll need to be. I was lucky I had a good team leader most of my time, but not everyone is that lucky.


The most repetitive call centre job you can imagine, except without any incentives like you might get through selling phones or insurance.
Calls last roughly an hour each and are pretty much fully scripted. You could try saying your own thing by using your brain, which would help the flow of conversation, but then your moronic team leader who has been given their job due to being completely devoid of any soul (and has no real authority), will tell you at the end of each month that you said a few words that weren't on the screen so will need to go on a performance plan.
The charity still glosses over this by giving it the whole, 'we put the clients first', nonsense. But in reality, it is just a joyless and depressing role where you will find that any empathy you might initially have for your clients who are in financial difficulty, will diminish within the first couple of weeks, when you realise that you have signed up to be chained to a chair for 8 (maybe 9 if you take a call at the wrong time) hours per day, trying to hold conversation with a furious client whilst strictly following a nonsensical, unnatural script. Over and over.
Every now and again, the management will try and distract you from your misery by suggesting that you all dress up in a funny costume so you can come to work and sit at your desk without communicating with anything else other than your headset until you leave - but dressed as Superman. However, unless you are 9, this is ineffective. They will also occasionally buy one or two cakes to cheer you up, much like you would do with a pet dog or gerbil, but you will have a very limited window in which you can get off your chair to eat any of it and may end up watching it rot in front of your eyes whilst your life drifts by on another hour long drag of a phone call. 
Each month you will have a fascinating discussion with your team leader/puppet about how long in total you spent at the toilet and how they have managed to wrangle their way out of scoring you 100% on your call quality because they are terrified that the centre manager may tighten the dog collar around their neck for not doing their job properly. 
A job for morons, run by morons. 
I would genuinely rather clean toilets than go back here.

Bad management who feel entitled and better than everyone -Everyone is square -You have a target of putting people in solutions based on a percentage of calls you get but a lot of the time people are just calling for advice so this makes no sense -It’s also 6 weeks of training of just tests, assessments and roleplays which they grade and mark you up for and give feedback on but the feedback was poor. - I got perfect feedback on 99% of the training and dismissed me for not getting a reference back but asked my trainer and she said it was ok if it doesn't come back and not to worry -Don’t actually give answers if you want to improve, they just tell you to be a certain way without actually teaching! your brain will be aching after the training it's forced into you -Everyone in management is two-faced and act nice but say one thing and they will write it down and judge you on the conversations you have with friends even on your cig breaks outside PEOPLE ARE LISTENING! stalker snitches -Not worth the wage you get and the healthcare and 24hr helpline is just because people call up saying they want to kill themselves so the company has to cover some way even if they don’t care ***If they don’t treat staff well how are you supposed to respect them as a charity? *** Also, work hours can be difficult if you don’t work in Leeds and you're expected to work Saturdays or Sundays and you never get days off work together with its just one random day


-When firing someone give them answers no lies then send a letter with different reasons on, its a joke and is an infringement of character -Allow the staff to stand up for them selfs and don't fire stronger people and just keep the week ones as they'll stay -Treat people fair, if it's a training group or standard staff respect what they say not just pretend with you little videos this is a family company, -If someone in training asks if they need to sort the reference out, tell them what to do not lie and let them loose there job.

I joined Stepchange because it was an admin based job, that had a positive impact on peoples lives. They stressed during the interview that they’re focussed on quality of work, not quantity.

However, 18 months into my role (and mid-pandemic), Stepchange changed my role so we would be taking inbound calls in a call centre environment. Half of my week is now spent on the phones, not what you want from an “admin” job.

The IT systems are rubbish. The older systems are prone to crashing, but are essential to the running of the charity. They have not been updated since probably the early 2000s. They did bring a new system, Pulse. However, 2.5 YEARS after its inception, it’s still very buggy. It crashes and sometimes deletes data. We are expected the sift through pages of work arounds to try to resolve these problems. If you can’t find what you’re looking for, your TL will pull you up on it.

It’s also a highly target driven environment. The quality of your work is graded from 3 random bits of work a month. You have to account for every minute of your day, including the multiple IT issues, by listing these by the minute.

They also don’t actually tell you what your targets are, they expect you to just guess. And then they increase your workload every 3 or 4 months.

Their sickness policy is also appalling. They view all sickness (even with a doctors note) as simply “absence “. If you’re poorly too much (the charity is rife with stress, mental illness etc), you will be put under close surveillance, which can escalate to disciplinary procedures or even being fired. This is now being expanded to include sickness from Covid, even though the pandemic is far from over.

Seeing as they’re a charity, they’re not very caring to their staff. They talk the talk and make loud, bold announcements about “self care” and caring about the staffs mental health. But if you actually become ill, they come down on you hard. Which makes the situation worse!

They’re as bad as any other large, corporate office. Don’t be fooled by their friendly media campaigns!

Working for Stepchange now is completely different compared to just a few years ago. 
They continue to provide excellent help and support for their clients. 
They no longer provide help and support for their staff. 
People are definitely viewed as numbers on a spreadsheet now. The charity isn't actually very charitable towards staff anymore. Especially anyone with outside commitments (children) or any disabilities / long term health issues etc. 
Several roles/departments have been merged into one with the intention of improving the client experience. 
This is great however, it has been carried out with minimal training and with no regard for extra pay or loyalty recognition or time served.
It is extremely rewarding to know that you have actually helped someone dealing with debt under some awful personal circumstances. 
It is extremely difficult to do this call after call when your employer is only interested in stats rather than your wellbeing.
Yes stats at a charity where the calls taken often involve discussing bereavement, unemployment, redundancy, mental health difficulties, terminal illness, homes being repossessed, being homeless, being in prison.
Certain soft skills are required to provide a high standard of customer service to such clients - such as empathy and rapport. 
It is impossible to pretend/fake these qualities. 
Genuine empathy and rapport is impossible to acheive without absorbing at least an element of what the client is going through.
This is very difficult to shake off between calls and after work. 
It would be a lot easier to do if there wasn't an added pressure of stats and attendance reviews.
This is no longer recognised or taken into account at StepChange.

I worked  here for 6 years, across 3 different departments.  The people were  amazing and made some life long friends. Nicest people you could ever meet. 

Since the charity changed its name, the CEO changed and they became regulated the charity was no longer a great place to work. It became just another standard monotonous call centre job and progrssion was very hard, unless management knew and liked you. When I left to become a full time mother the  staff turnover was high. 

Tips for working here would be to read all the HR policies and stick to them, read the quality standards often and really follow them to the letter. Also take as many calls as you can, never call in sick, don't be late and don't question something if it seems stupid. If you have a positive can do attitude and follow every rule,  you'll go far in this company. 

You'll find the majority of your time in this job is spent battling with clients who don't agree with our strict regulated policies. This means you're not really helpling people or giving much debt advice. Most of the calls are identical and once you get used to the knowledge and systems, you'll find you can do the job on auto pilot. It's marketed as a complex job but it's relatively simple once you get the experience.  You'll need a good memory as policies change weekly and so does debt advice. 

I wouldn't recommend working here if you have children, planning to have children or have any medical conditions. The company doesn't allow flexible working often and the sickness policy is incredibly sctict. 

Overall if you don't mind repetitive work, have a positive attitude, don't have a family or any medical conditions, this job is for you. Also it's very unlikely you'll be made redundant.

I started at the charity in November 2019 and left in July 2022 as I have moved countries. When I started, to suggest anyone would ever work from home was laughable, but to see how quickly the charity adapted around the pandemic was really admirable. I was on client support for the entirety of my time at StepChange and I made some friends for life. 

There were some structure changes which impacted the role quite significantly and there were times I was not really happy due to departmental politics because of these changes. It’s a really stressful job at times and there can be extremely difficult conversations to be had, but it’s also the most rewarding job I have ever had.

I will say the department I was on was very nit-picky and with call scoring and sometimes you felt like if you weren’t perfect you were a failure; so you do need thick skin as there isn’t much room for human error. You’ll also need thick skin with some clients too. 

I’ve found all my managers to be cracking and really supportive if I was struggling, I felt confident that anything disclosed to my managers was confidential.

I would absolutely return to the charity if I returned to the UK. When I started I was told by my manager (who was a previous advisor) that it takes about two years to really sink into the role and feel confident with the knowledge that you’ve built up. I found that really daunting at first but after I hit the two year mark I knew she was right. I left the charity feeling empowered and like I had made a significant difference to a lot of peoples lives. 

I started working for StepChange as the pandemic hit us, the speed at which StepChange managed to get us all kitted out and able to work from home was outstanding. 

There were a few system issues but that is a given during unprecedented times and management were very understanding. I will also add that for myself, much of the system issues were out of their control (eg. connectivity).

The training was over 4 weeks, and was definitely enough to get us prepared for giving advice on debt solutions. With debt advice, you are always learning, as the complexities that you face are wide ranging and can sometimes leave you puzzled (as with any job in debt advice) however, you are well supported at StepChange, and a more experienced advisor/team leader WILL help you if you ASK.

You are given tools and time to develop, although the opportunities to progress within the charity are very limited (especially if you are not based in Leeds), the charity were up front about this at the time of the interview, and I have since been able to progress outside of StepChange.

You will be expected to work a Saturday every fortnight, which is something I don't like doing, but on the plus side the work week is shorter so you can work 4 days and get very good sick pay. The people at the charity are great, especially the management, and I will miss working there.

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