Great people, terrible pay, struggling industry. - Art Editor Future Employee Review

2.0
Jul 16, 2017
Recommend
Business Outlook

Pros

• Very sociable – you'll meet some great friends. • You'll learn a lot. This company is full of people who are brilliant at what they do. • You'll work on some great products. Future manage to output a consistently high standard. • It's all special-interest magazines, so you get to work on something you really care about.

Cons

• Incredibly bad pay. • It's all special-interest magazines, so you get to work on something you really care about… but the powers-that-be are aware of that, and they will take advantage of that with crappy pay and zero other incentives to work there other than the very occasional free donut. • Almost zero chance of being internally promoted to a senior position beyond editor level; these are only taken by a clique of staff (some great, but some godawful and struggling to stay relevant) who have been there since the 90s, or have come straight in at a higher position. • Pretty much no benefits package or incentives other than pension and Bupa. The canteen used to be a Starbucks, then it was Costa, then it was eventually a terrible, nondescript company who were only there because they under-cut every other caterer for the contract. That's not massively important in itself, but it's kind-of representative of where the company once was and where it is now. • They cancelled the Christmas party for a number of years - the only yearly party – so staff organised their own (most of the staff are pretty awesome like that). But Future failed to notice until they jumped on it last-minute and put some money into it. It was a bit pathetic, and unfortunately testament to how much effort they bother putting in. Come on, Future – if you're going to put everyone on low salaries, at least try and look like you care once a year. • Historically, there have been wide redundancies every couple of years. • Internal budgets cuts mean everything needs to be done on a shoe-string.

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Future Response
8y
Thanks for offering this thorough feedback. We always appreciate feedback as we want to continuously improve and be a great employer to work for. Since your departure, we have created a People and Culture team, led by one of our Executive team as well as delivered a company wide project to make Future a fantastic place to work by making everything accessible for our people. We have been interviewing our current employees to gain their feedback so we can understand what’s important to them and so we can commit to delivering things or be transparent about what might need to be a longer term piece of work. Working in a very competitive market we need to keep reviewing and re-focussing where to invest our assets to maintain our market position and keep delivering our strategy. This often requires tough choices to be made on where we should invest and what luxuries we might have to forego. We are doing a huge push on our company values and our culture to create Future’s ‘Ways of Working’. Which we hope will engage and stimulate all of our fantastic people. We are proud of our past, we’ve gone through some very tough times, but we are now in a positive phase of strong growth and we look positively to our future.

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