A low trust, high stress environment - Anonymous employee ArmstrongB2B® Employee Review

1.0
2 May 2025
Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Fresh fruit and toiletries. A free coffee once a week.

Cons

Armstrong is a very low trust environment where bullying, harassment and favouritism are rife. Management don’t trust you to work from home, manage your own workload or arrive and leave on time. While they micromanage these parts of your work life the management never care to check in on you or take an interest in your work, but will tear you down if a mistake slips the net. Work life balance is non existent, you will have to work in the office 5 days a week with no flexible start or finish times. There’s a shutdown over Christmas which comes out of your meagre holiday allowance. City centre parking is expensive and the staff car park is first come first served but it’s implied only senior staff can even use it. You’ll have 30 minutes to grab lunch and run back to your desk. If you leave at 5.30 as your contract states you will be silently judged, as you’ll find your workload is so overwhelming that staying late for 30 minutes to an hour nearly everyday becomes the norm and is taken for granted. Sick pay is discretionary and until very recently there was no HR for a team of 50+ people. Promotions come grudgingly despite experience (except for client services where the turnover is so great that someone fresh out of university can go from junior account executive to a senior account manager within a year), and are provided with caveats and implications that you owe them. Development and training is something they’re keen to mention on their website but the reality is that you will be so over faced with churn work and tight deadlines that there will never be any plans put in place, and any suggestion of learning new tools or software is generally scoffed at by management. During my time at Armstrong I witnessed the following: • Members of staff being removed from the premises in the middle of the work day after handing in their notice simply to embarrass them • Members of staff being admonished due to their relationships outside of work • Members of staff having breakdowns over the demands of the job above and beyond their duties

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ArmstrongB2B® Response
1y
Thanks for your review - we really appreciate you taking the time to give us feedback & sorry you haven't had the best experience during your time here. At ArmstrongB2B we are going through a period of exciting growth in 2025 and we have invested in many of the areas you have raised - including in our HR and support teams to make sure that our colleagues feel supported and motivated to do their best whilst working here. I think it is worth responding to a couple of your points for the benefit of future reference - We do work from our city centre office 5 days per week - we believe that having all our skills under one roof is the best way to build a creative collaborative environment. - We do shut down for the Christmas period to give everyone time with their family and friends at that time of year. - We do offer 30mins unpaid lunch-break per day as standard in our contracts - Unfortunately at the office parking is seriously limited and is often required by visiting clients, but we do have a couple of more reasonable options for parking available in our city centre location (including Park and Ride, Season Ticket options and great public transport links), which we encourage our colleagues to explore. These are definitely preferable to the multi-storey city-centre pricing! - We are proud that many of our management team have progressed through the ranks and that we give colleagues the opportunity to progress through our established PDP programme. Training and development is a big focus of our HR team going forward. As Head of HR, I’m really disappointed that you experienced examples of behaviour which fall short of what we would expect of colleagues at ArmstrongB2B – if you would like to discuss these examples in more detail, please feel free to contact me directly (and confidentially) at mike.ashton@armstrongb2b.com. Thanks, Mike (Head of HR)

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1.0
28 Apr 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Lovely HR trying to bring the company into 2026 Great toiletries Free food often offered

Cons

An oppressive environment for anyone that works to live and not lives to work. Expectations of free time given to review non urgent work, to be available, (at least), from 8am until 6pm, to be physically present in office 5 days a week. To provide not only written creative briefs but then also be present to reiterate a verbal brief and beratement if you had not started work at the same time as the creative to provide this - but this company allows “flexible” working. Absolute lack of leadership. Managers? Sure, plenty of them but anyone to actually guide the Client Services team in a positive, efficient, mature way - absolutely none. A company where junior staff are being asked to fulfil roles way beyond their capabilities. Where communication is completely absent. A company that speaks of being award winning and progressive in their creative output and thinks nothing of the culture they are creating within. This is not an environment for anyone with life or previous work experience or anyone with a family or commitments beyond work. A stale, reductive and suffocating company.

4
1.0
1 Apr 2026
Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Free fruit, and a free coffee once a week

Cons

The environment is awful, you’re expected to work extra hours for free while being treated like dirt on the bottom of managements shoes. There is absolutely no room for training, even initial inductions, although they will consistently push that they have a training budget. It’s almost impossible to have a work/life balance while working here, you’re expected to be on hand whenever, no matter, you’ll receive messages and emails at all times of night. The pressure on every department is deplorable, people are constantly upset and overran with work that will be overbooked on them, again resulting in unpaid overtime. People are punished for making friends, even when the business will pretend they encourage friendships due to the need to work alongside each other to get projects over the line. Client services experience extreme pressure from senior management, which results in them putting added pressure on to the creatives. Account directors and managers are told to upsell but there’s no room for the projects in the studio, but there’s no ability to fully manage client expectations because the AMs aren’t allowed to say no to their clients. On top of that, you’ll watch your friends and colleagues be fired or made redundant and escorted off the property. In the last few months, there has been multiple firings and redundancies that are completely out of the blue, leaving these people struggling with their mental health and wondering where it all went wrong. It’s rare to find a happy staff member at Armstrong B2B.

7
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