Avoid working here! - Anonymous employee Future Employee Review

1.0
21 Mar 2017
Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Casual work attire, working from home and you aren't be penalised for being 5 minutes late. The work environment is mostly good due to working colleagues on the same level being a decent lot in my experience of several years, even with business slowly cracking around me.

Cons

Future is intent on reducing teams to breaking point whereby some critical employees are laid off and their responsibilities passed onto others who have no understanding or training of those responsibilities. And I don't mean minor roles, these are roles which functioned flawlessly and brought financial benefits, which can no longer be properly handled (or done at all) after the layoffs. Culling staff is a yearly event, starting in November. It's become the normality for a number of years. I've seen colleagues go into consultation days before Christmas for the past two years. To save money Future aims looks to fill jobs with graduates where possible. The cost cutting exercise throughout the business is draining the business of experienced employees. The company has a mission to cut costs to become profitable, it makes less money each year so the answer is keep squeezing the overheads regardless of consequences. It's effectively speeding up it's own decline as it just gets worse at delivering. There's absolutely no career development, training, or support from managers. As an employee of Future you either sink or swim. Ask a manager for help/advice on an assigned task from them and you often get nothing back, they simply don't fundamentally manage; they may not have the answer so avoid any response. I've experienced this face-to-face with my manager many times, and my emails ignored. I could go on for hours here, but I think I've made my point. I'm not a bitter ex-employee I'm glad to be made redundant and receive compensation. I was offered an opportunity to apply for another role but refused, it's just not worth spending so much of my working life swimming in these toxic conditions, 15+ years is quite enough. I feel sad for my friends at Future who remain in the circumstances I've escaped. If you plan to work for Future, know the above. You'll find this out for yourself once you've passed the honeymoon period of the shiny new job.

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Future Response
8y
Thank you for posting feedback, since you are an ex-employee we are sorry you experienced tough situations. We always try to make sure our employees have the freedom to come with feedback to their line manager and otherwise to their HR-representative. The employees have ensured the success of Future and therefore we try to communicate as much as possible with them. We have gone through financial hardship in years passed and although our headcount did reduce, we hope that those who left the business feel they were treated fairly and understood the reasons for their departures. Working in the ever-changing media market, we must stay ahead of our competitors and being a leader within our market takes a lot of commitment from all of our people. We are very grateful of our teams because of their flexibility and passion for the company, without their skills and expertise we wouldn't be where we are now. With our increasing amount of internal comms, we communicate our positive but also more difficult changes so our staff are aware of what is happening within the company. Our main driver for this is to create stability for our staff and a sense of transparency. We are proud of our brands and the people who are a part of those brands. We also need to keep our focus forward and ensure we retain our talented people in the business to help us get there.

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Good pay Great benefits Cares about work-life balance

Cons

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1.0
6 Feb 2026
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Pros

- Everyone is super engaged with their work - Teams meet and share their progress regularly - Remote work that respects your timezone

Cons

- Unbearable amounts of micromanagement - Questionable journalistic ethics, e.g. "reviewing" products that have merely been unboxed and photographed, as well as excessive AI authorship - Extremely misleading work expectations — was told in interviews that I would be working on one story per day, resigned when I was expected to handle more than 15 in a week - Very reluctant to grant PTO or sick days — work "missed" while off is expected to be made up for twofold, and I was told at one point while sick with the stomach flu to "get over it" and "just work on 'easy' stuff today"

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