3.8 out of 5 stars.
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Silver Fern Farms Employee Reviews

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Location
New Zealand119 reviews

Ratings by category

3.5Work–Life Balance
3.7Pay & Benefits
3.3Job Security & Advancement
3.4Management
3.6Culture

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Indeed Featured review

The most useful review selected by Indeed
It's got some great workers the trouble is the seasonality is stressful as your money is only enough to cover basic week to week costs and when your laid off for the maintenance period it's a struggle which unless you have multiple forms of income and a partner working proves very difficult to manage

Pros

free lunches, attendance incentives, meat sales for staff, training

Cons

low pay, seniority (hard to get ahead ), dangerous work environment
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Challenging environment to work in

Witnessed significant issues during my employment at Pareora, including poor management, instances of racism, and a lack of productivity among some workers. The use of outdated machinery further exacerbated the work environment. Unfortunately, being disliked by Kiwi coworkers often led to a difficult experience at Pareora, with certain individuals making it particularly challenging. It sometimes felt as if employees were treated as expendable assets rather than valued members of the team.Employee turnover rates are notably high, which is readily comprehensible in light of the subpar working conditions.The management should definitely step up and tackle this problem pronto to create a more employee-friendly environment.

Pros

Pay

Cons

Poor management, favouritism, discrimination, lazy colleagues
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Horrible environment, even worse management

Management are not interested in career growth or promoting an equal work environment, long hours and low pay. If you have an issue, nobody is willing to help as they all blame each other an don't like to take accountability. Bully environment.
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Good money for the work.

Management seem to have issues managing. Easy to be off task alot of favouritism towards more senior staff. The money is probably the only good thing, some good people but they generally move on.
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Poor management run like a zoo at the circus

0/10 worst place to work would not recommend. Poor pay, management gossip & don’t care about peoples dignity staff treat their workers like absolute shh..it

Pros

Some of the people

Cons

The place is feral.
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Good work mates, alright pay but place is runned like its North Korea

Alright pay, plenty of good work mates but that its. Chance to gain some skills, make some money then move on to better pastures.Could go on about the issues there but who wants to read a novel. Need better management. To sum it up, if you wonder want north korea is like work for SFF pareora.

Pros

Pay, chance to gain new skills.

Cons

Supervisors, Management, irregular work pattern, bad company.
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S*it place

Management couldn't run a p*ss up at a brewery, or even a decant bbq. Worked in 40c conditions on the slaughterboard during covid, they waited for several people to pass out before sending us home over the 4 day heatwave, still at least 35 most days of summer. Didn't give us masks for the first months of covid or social distancing and we had no working air con, 1 buck soda too expensive for the company bbq... Overworked like **** and treated like dogs by management who didn't do ****. Got sick from their disgusting unfiltered water fountains with water I wouldn't give to my dog and then pressure you like **** to come in sick then give you a written warning and try to suspend you when you do come in sick, and then dont let you progress to a decent job, and advance all the new night shift staff to those jobs after night shift finishes because its easier... They dont give a **** about your mental wellbeing and will fire you over trying to deal with it rather than try and help you through it. Would rather clean toilets than work there again...
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Overworked, underpaid.

Bad management. Poor leadership and poor supervision. Good training non existent. Poor communication from management to workers. Poor management of work injuries.

Pros

Meat sales

Cons

Long hours, lack of notice for compulsory overtime work. Always short staffed.
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Plagued with Bad Culture

My experience was sad, stressful and I often felt overwhelmed (from broken machines and no support) Management and team leaders lacked basic communication skills, and the engineering team are very difficult to work with. Definitely some jobs are better than others there, but unfortunately if your female your more likely to work the fast paced/lesser paid jobs.

Pros

Good Pay Good Hours Great Training

Cons

Bad Work Culture Outdated Tools&Equipment/Machines
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Not a fun place

Constantly short staffed. Moved around all the time.same production targets regardless of how many people are absent. Poor supervisors and management.

Pros

Home time

Cons

Treated like dirt and a slave
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Awesome fun, if you're doing it for a season.

Wonderful place to work at met alot of people and had encouragement throughout the whole time I had worked there. Made many mistakes, and all mistakes were addressed by the management team! They definitely aimed for perfection. Which is good.

Pros

Free lunch sometimes when season ends, and bonuses.

Cons

Long hours, long bus trips.
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Good people to work with employees

Employees were great to work with. Supervisors a few of them were bullies and got away with it. Alot of people have quit this season due to being treated badly. No respect for the workers .

Pros

None

Cons

Long hours
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Fun place to work ♥️ supervisor's are very friendly and so encouraging

I love working in this place me and my family's are moving back to Auckland but I never forget this company's if I we ever move back to matamata I will definitely go back to work it fun working there and the job are easy supervisor 's are so friendly and so helpful when I needed help love you SILVER FERNS

Pros

No free lunch which is ok

Cons

Wages are very good aspecially whe it comes to the little Cows hhhh i had a fat pay check hhh
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fun place that takes care of its employees

my time at silver fern farms was great, it was a whole different situation to what i'm used to and it was fun working with lots of different people from different cultures

Pros

everyone is fun to talk to. alot of cultures

Cons

some of the work can get pretty hard
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Productive work place, good people to work with, great place to be

I like to get to work early to sharpen tools, and to micro pause when I can and to see where I am on te manning sheet, learned lots while working here, first aid, phec certificates, emergency response team (ert), knife handling skills, health and safety (rep), first aid responder and more, management team they have now are way more professional then the last lot, which is a big help. Work place culture on te late shift is sweet as for me, you just need to adapt and mingle in where you can you’ll be fine! Hard part working here? Keeping knife razor sharp, but when you crack that job is super easy! Best part about working here? The job, the people, the experience, mates looking out for mates!

Pros

Management’s easy to talk to, open door policy

Cons

Some long hours...
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No career pprospects

Silverfern Farms has the potential to be a great company to work for. Unfortunately, stagnant middle management won't allow the company to move forward or train keen people to move up.There is a toxic departmental favoritism from upper management. There is a ranking type system on how "important" you are based on your years of service.This dosnt always take precidence on what you can do as "suitability" is the card they play to put you in a position to balance out a shift with relevant experience.Its not all bad, the individual teams have a comrade mentality. We are doing this together etc. Have shared lunches and help each other outside of work.If silverfern farms offered more in the way of helping pathway towards a career working for them and listen to others ideas .it could be a great place to work and ultamately attract better, younger workers.

Pros

Work mates

Cons

No career prospects
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Great place to work.

It was awesome place to work learnt so much. Have a great sense of community and very supportive. It was supposed to be a in between job for me but I loved it so much I didn’t want to leave.
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fun workplace

Personally the pay is extremely good you wouldn't get pay like that from most work place, it's worth all the hard work and you get to make a lot of cool friends that could become life time friends.
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Hard but fair

Over all a good company to work for and if you put in the effort there are a lot of rewards in getting to a higher level with the company, the effort you put in does not go unnoticed, so if you were looking at working for the company i would recommend its high in standards for the well been and safety of all workers across the board and it does that by a full follow up and reports on any near miss or any accidents which show how they can help or look to improve in any areas across the plant to make sure there workers arrive and get home safe which i think is a company moving forward with the times at a high standard and i put that down to good management.

Pros

Staff sales, training

Cons

nil
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challenging

I wasn't too sure of which department I was going to be working in the 2 years that I worked doing bobbies.When doing the hides self taught .Self taught in the hides and when I was doing the joints most of the time the cutter broke down and it was hands on.
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quite productive

Very smooth job. From start to finish, you would not feel the time. 9hours and it felt like working 5hours. positive team and environment. Quite a massive company with multi cultured people.
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Overall rating

Based on 124 reviews

Ratings by category

3.5 out of 5 stars for Work/Life Balance
3.7 out of 5 stars for Salary/Benefits
3.3 out of 5 stars for Job Security/Advancement
3.4 out of 5 stars for Management
3.6 out of 5 stars for Culture

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