Pros
This review is written with the idea of giving insight into an extremely complex company. I can assure you it is like no other place to work. I have been at the company since 2017 and seen it grow from cool start-up to what it is today. On the surface, it ticks all the boxes of a cool and trending company and to a small degree, it achieves that. Luno has one of the best visions in the world. There are few companies out there that have a mission statement that is amazing to get behind and fewer who actually stand-by it and an even smaller subset that can actually deliver it. Luno ticks these boxes well. There is some great quality of life perks that the company provides that are awesome for employees. These are mainly designed around having a world-class onboarding experience. Which has been a big focus part of the company. (this aspect later forms one of the bigger problems). However, there are lunches and comfortable working environments. The people you work with are world class. There are people for such diverse and interesting backgrounds. I have always been blown the type of people that are interested in working in the industry. In addition to that and depending on the office, it has a fantastic culture at the peer level. This is very much the case in the Cape Town office, however, not all offices share this feeling.
Cons
It is with a heavy heart that I mention the cons as I am typically not a person who likes to complain but it is worth mentioning. The company has grown so massively since I started. As of this post, we are over 200 employees. This growth is at the root of many of the problems the company faces. Too fast too quickly with not much attention placed on the wellbeing of the employees One of the front running things worth mentioning is: The company is fast becoming a corporate. Not a traditional formal attire corporate, but a corporate where it loses the charm that made it such a great place to work. The management team have tried really hard to accommodate the ambitious growth and there are not doing a great job. This is understandable if had the benefits of a corporation, such as medical aid but it does not. Luno is no longer a cool place to work where you can move the needle anymore. The type of people the company attracts is usually high performing, young and ambitious people. This is an ideal person to have in your workforce but the managing leads have no clue how to direct these people. Loads of ideas, solutions and progress gets lost in the middle management ranks. This is sad as even to this day the company boasts it can move faster than the competition. While I am sure it could, it is not gearing itself for it. It's building itself to be a traditional company. The focus has been on getting new people and that seems to be where to scope ends. There is no succession plan for employees and no actionable interest in growing current staff. There has been a lot of mention of them doing this but nothing tangible has historically happened. If you are reading this and think, I am a young and ambitious person and wanting to see if you can accelerate your career at Luno in a new industry then I am sorry to say you won't be as accelerated as you expect. There has been very little real work done on growing people in the company. Recently a new policy was put in place called the development ladder to help address these issues but it is nothing more than a corporate ladder - they did not even try to hide the name "ladder". The intention is to create a fair system for growth but I doubt it will achieve that, instead be an inhibiting growth policy. The HR department/People team who have a history of being unbiased oversees this process. It is very management centric policy [Disclaimer - I will remove this comment if the ladder actually achieves good outcomes for the teams]. I will be fair and say that the management team are trying their utmost to work with these issues, to varying degrees of success. I am happy to report that even with the issues there are acknowledgements of where there can be improvements. More and more channels to management being opened to discuss employee sentiment as time goes by. Hopefully, the criticism gets taken on board and Luno can finally start loving its employee as much as it loves its customers.
