Future reviews

3.2

44% would recommend to a friend

(712 total reviews)

Kevin Li Ying

60% approve of CEO

36% 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
Sep 6, 2019

Not worth working for

Recommend
Business Outlook

Pros

Unlimited time off i guess?

Cons

Future is exceptionally eager to acquire companies, but the aftermath is often chaotic and frustrating. If you do get acquired, start working on your resume. Layoffs happen, and often persist long after the acquisitions. Any potential promotions that were in the offing are probably on permanent hold, as they don't seem to offer any paths toward advancement. If you're a writer, join the union! Annual raises are small, ostensibly to cover the cost of living, but that will never offset the poor initial pay. There's little interest in cultivating or utilizing any of the expertise anyone might have. Things are incredibly siloed, with decisions made without care or impact of those who might be impacted the most, or those who might have a closer view of how it might work better. HR deserves special mention, among the least effective HR departments I've ever worked with. They struggle especially with getting insurance coverage right so double check to make sure you got in the right plan and that everyone who needs to be is on your plan. It may take multiple emails to get things ironed out.

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Future Response
6y
Thank you for taking the time to leave a review of Future. Future is a highly ambitious company and one of our strategic goals will always be to grow. We value the incredibly talented people who have made this growth possible and deliver amazing things everyday. At Future, we offer a variety of programs to reward and recognize our greatest asset - our people. And, in line with our ambitious growth goals, we continuously evaluate and evolve our culture to provide a rewarding employee journey. We are proud of the opportunities offered to our employees. With growth comes opportunity and the increasing number of promotions, development opportunities, internship programs (to name a few) contribute to our culture of success. If you have any further suggestions for how we can enhance the employee experience, please reach out to us on peopleandculture@futurenet.com.
2.0
Jun 28, 2019
Recommend
Business Outlook

Pros

- Unlimited Annual Leave - The people (the majority of people anyway!) - Working across interesting content and big named brands - Company has been transformed since Zillah has become CEO - The company will often surprise you with treats i.e. a day off, cup cakes, etc - The conferences are usually pretty good and informative

Cons

- Due to volume of migrations / company purchases there are a lot of fragmented teams, and work is often duplicated or roles cut and the work dropped on other teams, without the required additional resources (I guess they would call this synergies!). Though I do appreciate this would take a while to work through. - If your face doesn't fit you will not progress in the company. In my opinion, managements favourite's progress regardless of performance. - Aggressive / toxic environment to work in - I've seen people made to cry in meetings on a number of occasions, but nothing is seen to be done about it - Until you move away from Future you don't realise how pressurised and crazily fast paced the environment is. Definitely a recipe for burn out. - In my opinion, I don't feel like the people within the business are valued or cared about. They are simply a means to an end i.e. becoming a billion £ company. - I don't feel like Future lives up to their core values

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Future Response
6y
Thank you for your review of Future plc and taking the time to tell us about your experiences here. We’re so happy to hear that you loved working with your Future colleagues and that you enjoyed the staff benefits we’ve implemented. The last year has been a transformative time at Future due to our various acquisitions. While we appreciate that this created a feeling of change, our People & Culture team wanted this to be as minimally disruptive as possible. Connection is what makes our teams tick, and this is why we have centralised some teams and brought others closer together. Our aim isn't to replace people or teams but to make our methods of working more collaborative and efficient. Career development is based on experience and merit. To enable continuous professional development, we regularly promote new internal vacancies, lead a yearly schedule of Lunch & Learn workshops and have introduced a new management training scheme to support the development of our managers. We want Future to always be a positive and supportive place to work. If you’ve seen any instances where you believe this isn’t the case, we encourage you to reach out to peopleandculture@futurenet.com so we can look into this.
2.0
Apr 11, 2019

Resistant to change or listen

Recommend
Business Outlook

Pros

The people I directly work with are fantastically talented, down to earth and I've learned so much from them. There's unlimited PTO (albeit with caveats, as the company has a somewhat complicated policy of what constitutes PTO and what doesn't).

Cons

The upper management acts as if it's actively listening to employees through surveys and messaging, but those gestures are rarely translated into any material change. They make decisions brazenly that greatly impact and affect everyone's workflow, and only realize they might have overreacted or made a mistake when the backlash inevitably happens (as in the case of the hotdesking policy, or the total lack of preparations for new employees healthcare following a major acquisition). As a quick aside with regard to healthcare and benefits, they're pretty bad -- my healthcare plan treats practically every clinic as out of network, and 401k matching is low. On the surface, management says they welcome criticism or suggestions, but it's almost always dismissed or taken as an insult. The company shows it doesn't really value its employees in those ways, but it also demonstrates that behavior in how incredibly cheap it is. If you travel by air for your job, the company will prioritize flights with layovers just to save an insignificant amount of money. If you need programs and equipment to do your job better (or, at all) you'll be met with heavy resistance from IT. One executive who spends little time in NY expressed disappointment at a perceived "lack of morale" in the office, rather than inquiring why this may have been the case, or reflecting on controversial decisions their team made that may have caused this. And the slow recognition of the union -- coupled with the company's rejection of key staff in an apparent effort of weakening the union's power -- reinforces the feeling that the company does not value the people at the bottom.

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Future Response
7y
Thank you for your review of Future plc. As you know, we recently conducted a survey for our US side of the business, inviting staff to tell us what they enjoyed about working at Future and what could be improved. We received some amazing feedback, with staff highlighting how much they loved working in their teams, that they felt proud to work at Future and that they enjoyed the fast-paced culture of a global media company. While this was wonderful to see, we know that there have been challenges for our US staff which we are committed to overcoming together. As we recently communicated in our Town Hall meetings, we realise that moving everyone into one company after our acquisitions of Purch and Newbay was tough for some people. We are learning from this and making changes to ensure Future is an even better place to work. Following on from feedback, we recently altered our hotdesking policy in our New York office, allocating permanent desks to all members of staff. We have also put together an office committee, to ensure everyone has a voice and can get to know one another. If staff have any questions regarding our healthcare benefits or our company policy around travel, we encourage you to reach out to our People & Culture team. Our Head of People & Culture, is also running weekly Ask Me Anything sessions. We are committed to improving the culture of the US organisation and we can only do this if we work together to tackle the challenges.
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Glassdoor has 785 Future reviews submitted anonymously by Future employees. Read employee reviews and ratings on Glassdoor to decide if Future is right for you.