Future reviews

3.2

46% would recommend to a friend

(712 total reviews)

Kevin Li Ying

65% approve of CEO

37% positive business outlook

Future has an employee rating of 3.2 out of 5 stars, based on 712 company reviews on Glassdoor which indicates that most employees have a good working experience there. The Future employee rating is in line with the average (within 1 standard deviation) for employers within the Mídia e comunicação industry (3.7 stars).

Reviews by job title

712 reviews
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.

avatar
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.
2.0
Dec 19, 2016
Recommend
Business Outlook

Pros

If you’re beginning your media career, Future is a great company to join. It has some amazing brands across print, digital and the web. The company culture invokes a silicon-valley start-up feel: hard working, passionate and with free food. If you’re young and don’t have dependants, it’s an amazing place to work and to learn. Latterly, through acquisition, the firm has grown too.

Cons

Future is also a great company at which to end your career. Like silicon-valley start-ups it’s profits come at the expense of job security, pay and prospects. Agile means getting two people to do the job of five; lean means no budget; efficiency means constant reorganisations and round after round of redundancies. Meagre margins mean the company is forever looking for innovative ways to do more with less. Bottom line: If you’re young, join and learn. If you’ve got kids, the lingering spectre of redundancy eventually becomes unbearable. Whatever your age, keep your CV fresh at all times.

avatar
Future Response
9y
Thank you kindly for taking the time to write a review here - we really appreciate it. Your positive feedback is warmly received and we think its great that our working environment is attractive for ambitious junior talent. We're sorry to hear that you felt your job-security was at risk as the company constantly evolves to stay ahead of the curve. We are very honest with the fact that we move quickly and we need to always be cost-effective and innovative but we would not want this to come at the expense of people feeling secure in their role and engaged in the work they are doing. Thank you for your feedback on this matter. We recently introduced a new company-wide profit share scheme so that every single one of our employees has the opportunity to share in our success and that recognises everyone's hard work contributes to our bottom line. We have recently acquired two businesses and are excited to add these new brands to our portfolio. We are always looking ahead and hope that all of our team are on the journey with us and feel engaged in the roles they are doing.
2.0
Oct 25, 2015

Its good until it isn't

Anonymous employee
Recommend
Business Outlook

Pros

There are lots of great people at the company in the US. Everyone seemed really on-board with trying to transform the business out of the 90's and into the present.

Cons

Moving entire teams to the UK without any advanced notice, come on folks, respect your employees enough to give them some heads up. Real decisions are made in the UK, which sucks because a lot of really great work comes out of the US.

Viewing 49 - 51 of 712 Reviews

Glassdoor has 784 Future reviews submitted anonymously by Future employees. Read employee reviews and ratings on Glassdoor to decide if Future is right for you.