Future reviews

- 'Unlimited' paid time off is essentially a scam to draw in new employees; you do have unlimited holiday time, but most roles ensure that you're too busy to feasibly take more than you'd get at any other company without appearing like you're not committed to your job. - Upper management fails consistently on communication and support. New work plans are introduced without explanation, whole teams are fired with very little notice, and a complex management hierarchy is used to obfuscate and slow efforts from staff to communicate with senior execs. - Pay for the vast majority of employees is lower than it should be; despite this Future's executive staff have large salaries and larger bonuses. Future was recently noted to be the worst publisher in the UK for pay disparity between the CEO and average staff pay. In the past year, many employees at various levels of the hierarchy have left for better-paying work elsewhere. - Too much time is wasted in mandatory meetings and presentations. - Forced emphasis on 'company values' that feels upsettingly hollow when senior management totally fails to live up to said values. - Poor support for employees suffering from disabilities or long-term illnesses. - Utter failure from Future's leadership to 'walk the walk' on social issues; half-hearted commitments to current social causes are then walked back with censorship of writers and a general lack of sufficient diversity, especially at the senior management level. - Aggressive pursuit of return-to-office policies despite record profits during COVID lockdowns, where almost all staff were working from home. - No actual HR department. This is a SERIOUS problem.

The editorial staff is given impossible publishing and traffic targets. It's disheartening to be told month after month, year after year, that your team is not doing enough — especially when everyone is constantly putting in overtime in an effort to achieve impossible goals. Teams are severely understaffed. Burnout is rampant and morale is low. Writers and editors are churning out sub-par content, sacrificing quality for quantity, and occasionally even publishing plagiarism. What used to be a top-notch newsroom is now more of a content mill, and it's full of wasted talent. There's a lot of employee turnover. Future is losing a lot of its best talent in editorial, and their positions are being filled with underqualified candidates who are almost exclusively located in the UK. That's likely because they can underpay our colleagues in the UK, where the staff are not unionized. In many instances, writers in the UK are paid about half what their American counterparts make. According to Press Gazette, in 2021 "Future recorded one of the lowest median employee pay packages at £36,775, while also recording one of the highest chief executive pay packages in the country." Annual raises are not guaranteed for non-union members and certainly do not account for inflation. There are no performance reviews, so it can be difficult to make the case for a raise or promotion.