Future reviews

Everything : 1. You will not work, you will be slave driven every day without fail. 2. You will meet amazing people, and the next day they will disappear. This company has the fastest turnover in the history of uk companies. 3. You will then have to pick up the work of the leavers, because they sneakily do not replace / cannot replace headcount because good employees do not want to work at Future. 4. You will be undervalued, undermined, micromanaged and bullied at every turn. 5. Managers need training desperately. 6. The CEO Zillah micro managers every ounce of the company. She will tell you that you are "helping row the boat", whilst she gets all the benefits on DECK 1 , and you are left sinking in the "boiler room, tossing coals at the fire". 7. HR Department : Does not exist. Rumour has it most of that department have quit. So it is impossible to air opinions on the role /duties / or raise issues because there is no one with any experience to help. 8. You will be expected to work late nights and weekends to keep up with your workload. All of which is unpaid, as editorial deadlines loom. 9. Plagiarism is rife amongst the writers who are pushed to churn out tons of material in a short period of time. 10. Save yourself the bother asking for more money, the salaries do not even hit the std benchmark of the industry. This company has never heard of benchmarking. 11. Someone came up with a harebrained idea to use the "graduate scheme" to replace roles. They are using graduates to fulfil vacancies. 12. If you read any reviews on here that states " collaborative , fast paced " these are fake reviews written by management. To the person who is doing that , stop your fake reviews are obvious. 13. Finally diversity and inclusion does not exist, shocking for a media company that refuses to equally hire people of colour. A walk through the office floors is proof enough.

Where to start? Future..... for a company called Future, it's odd how many people want to make it their past. Future's last big acquisition was Dennis Publishing. At the time, we were told they wanted to acquire the expertise Dennis had in subscriptions marketing etc. But within a few months, every single senior manager from Dennis had gone (along with some senior editors). I don't know why, but the fact that managers at Future have almost no decision-making power might have been a part of it. Managers get told what to do; then challenged about how they did it. Maybe that is not rewarding work for ambitious, intelligent, creative people. Look at the reviews here, and there are so many complaints about how no one gets to do anything without permission from the highest level; and often they seem scared to ask. Why would that be? Also, for a company called Future, some of its systems are ancient. Almost every week, there is a message from IT about a system disruption. It just makes everything more difficult and grinds you down. At Future, the bottom line is everything. Forget about expenses! If they absolutely have to, they will put you up in a cheap hotel. But if a manager wants to buy their team a drink, it will have to come out of their pocket. That's a bit sad, but what is really frustrating is that they don't invest properly in central services; so rather than pay for enough HR people, or accounts people, they get teams to do as much of their own HR work, invoice processing, etc, on top of their actual job. If you have to get help from HR - or People & Culture as its called - you'll wish you didnt. They barely respond to emails. (Though I see P&C finds time to post responses here, and also - I would guess, from the tone of some of them - to write a fair few bogus positive reviews too.) The CEO likes to say that at Future, decisions get made fast. Yeah, maybe if you have some great money making (or money saving) scheme, it will happen fast. They do have some good departments, who get stuff done. But if you want something to happen that is not about making or saving money, you'll be swimming in treacle. Future is not an evil corporation. People get by; maybe some Wolf of Wall Street types even thrive here. But there is no joy in it. It's mean-spirited and corporate and faceless. The CEO writes upbeat friendly sounding emails to all staff every week, but they give a completely misleading sense of what the day to day reality of working here is like. It's not a nice place to work.