Future reviews

Unfortunately, these teams are being held back every day by utter incompetence from the rest of the company. HR, especially, are away with the fairies. Total obsession with absurd, sitcom-worthy, Americanised "team-building exercises" that offer absolutely no value to anyone whatsoever. The HR team can find the time to drag you away to the countryside for these exercises for a three-day break. Raise a real issue, however, like being completely unable to carry out your day-to-day tasks due to broken computers or a lack of phone access, and you'll be ignored entirely for weeks on end. Clever schemes like "unlimited holiday" sound fantastic but actually lead to employees taking fewer holidays than they are due. You'll get no support from other teams, either. No access to the server? IT will respond to your *urgent* message three weeks later saying "Is this still a problem?" The accounts team will simply refuse to help you, full stop.

The constant undercurrent of anxiety. When I left, the fear level wasn't as in-the-red as it was a couple of years ago, since Future switched from mass redundancies to a drip-drip approach to axing jobs which is easier to hide. Still, you can expect to feel insecure in your position - and constantly on edge, wondering what will be the next ill-thought-out “innovation” enforced without any consultation. It will probably involve a spreadsheet. Management love pointless spreadsheets. Lack of resources. If you get through six months without suffering cuts to budgets or head count, count yourself lucky. Teams are now absolutely pared to the bone. A merger with Imagine Publishing in 2016 felt more like a takeover, with Imagine’s worst working practices (inflexible control-freakery; undermining of editorial authority; cheap-jack recycling of “content”; a reliance on graduate labour) lauded as best practice and rolled out across the entire company. Appalling work/life balance. If you’re committed to producing something you can be proud of, you can expect to work a great many evenings and weekends with no reward. This makes Future’s recently introduced “unlimited holiday” policy a joke – a great many people are taking less time off than they did before it was introduced, because of the increased workload. The company communication style is widely viewed with scorn for its perceived lack of honesty. The classic Future pattern is to hold a gathering trumpeting how well everything is going; two days later, the news will start spreading on the grapevine about the latest cutbacks and redundancies. Future doesn’t seem to believe in treating its employees as grown-ups who can handle hearing a mix of good news and bad, or putting its managers in a position where they have to justify "difficult decisions". A bread and circuses approach, rather well summed up by initiatives like “Monthly Munchies” - a doomed attempt to detoxify morale by giving everyone a dry 10p burger once a month. The tiresome ubiquity of Future’s trite and vacuous “company values” (such as “We’re all in the boat” and “Let’s do this!”) which are painted on office walls and repeated ad nauseum in every company-wide email.