Macfarlane Group Reviews

3.4

60% would recommend to a friend

(55 total reviews)

Peter Atkinson

77% approve of CEO

58% positive business outlook

Macfarlane Group has an employee rating of 3.4 out of 5 stars, based on 55 company reviews on Glassdoor which indicates that most employees have a good working experience there. The Macfarlane Group employee rating is in line with the average (within 1 standard deviation) for employers within the Transportation and logistics industry (3.5 stars).

Reviews by job title

55 reviews
2.0
30 Aug 2025

Nice People but not great

Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Good people Good products Well known company in industry

Cons

Induction not structured and not great Workload is excessive and spread thin Targets can be unrealistic Pressure is constant

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Macfarlane Group Response
7mo
Thank you for sharing your feedback. We’re pleased you had positive experiences with our people, products, and benefitted from our reputation in the market. We recognise the past year has been challenging for many in sales, and we’re continually reviewing our structure and support to help manage workloads and targets more effectively. We’ve also made recent improvements to our induction/onboarding process, ensuring new colleagues feel well prepared from day one (albiet this is constantly under review with an eye on further refinements and improvements). Thank you again for your contribution and for the constructive suggestions. We wish you every success for the future.
1.0
15 Oct 2020
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Generally Nice people Dinosaur IT Retro 1980s Good for understanding how things shouldn't be done Secretive - great if you want to get in to 1960s spy work James Bond style/Bletchley park

Cons

Triplicate paper Lack of training or when training is provided it's interupted No investment in IT everything is done on a shoe string

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Macfarlane Group Response
5y
Many thanks for your review. We're sorry that you experienced some frustrations during your time with us but appreciate you sharing the feedback. Certainly, working with a jolly nice bunch of people is a key benefit of working for our business and something that we have heard people comment time and again over the years. Our business has continued to invest year-on-year to ensure our IT infrastructure ; systems keep pace with an ever changing market. Yes there are always further improvements to make and this is very much ongoing, much as it would be for any business of our size and scale. Again, given the nature of our business, there are admittedly processes which do sometimes require documenting rigorously for audit purposes and we acknowledge that occasionally (for some) this can lead to frustrations. But such processes are in place for good reason and it only usually requires an extra minute or two of someone's time to follow these steps. We're sorry if you feel the training didn't go to plan, we have invested significantly with certain individuals across recent years and again do acknowledge that there were some teething problems with a training provider being used to deliver IT training across 2019-2020. This has however been happily resolved and we are now working with an MS Global training partner to deliver all of our ongoing IT training needs. Thanks again for your comments, we wish you well with your onward career journey.
2.0
20 Jul 2018
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

You can purchase up to 3 days holiday on top if 22 day allowance.

Cons

Poor management and blatant favouritism. Management constantly intimidated staff and if you refused to suck up to them they found a reason to dismiss you to make way for others that would.

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Macfarlane Group Response
7y
Thank you for posting your review. We take yours and all ex-employee feedback very seriously and use it to help review and continuously improve the way we operate. We are disappointed to read this posting, especially since we take employee morale and development very seriously. Please note that for all distribution employees, the annual leave entitlement has now been increased to 25 days annually (plus bank holidays) for all roles at all levels. We wish you well in your future employment.
Viewing 1 - 3 of 55 Reviews

Glassdoor has 56 Macfarlane Group reviews submitted anonymously by Macfarlane Group employees. Read employee reviews and ratings on Glassdoor to decide if Macfarlane Group is right for you.