How are flexible working hours at Burson?

Flexible working, although due to change come April and private health care

SLT is self serving and promotions are few and far between

Goes without saying that working at one of the largest global agencies in the world offers brilliant career opportunities. You’ll be exposed to great big name clients and a range of projects and if you make the most of these opportunities, your career development will be accelerated. Some incredible professionals at the London office - a lot of learning opportunities and in my experience, mostly a collaborative, supportive environment but unfortunately there has been some bad behaviour breeding as the company has gone through the merger transition and financial challenges. Values flexible working, good benefits.

Especially since late 2023, H&K and now Burson has struggled with an eroding culture as the organisation has gone through a lot of change. People aren’t feeling valued and career progression feels stunted. People are going years without pay or promotion review and it has to be said that the firm’s salaries are quite below market standard. Some struggles with retention and capacity, meaning people are regularly overworked. Poor bonus structure, so feels like all your hard work can be for nothing sometimes.

Great roster of global clients in various sectors, good brand name for the CV and part of WPP, interesting work, and generally nice people and opportunities to learn.

Abysmal in everything to do with employee engagement... Inconsistent and confusing comms from the top - ironic for a comms company. Salaries are generally below industry and market standard. There are very few pay rises, not even a yearly inflationary one (this should really be standard practice and was at my previous two companies - at least a 2-3% rise otherwise you are effectively getting a pay cut every single year that passes due to cost of living increases). There is no bonus system at all, even for senior staff. This means there is very little incentive to go the extra mile as all you will get is a pat on the back and promise of a promotion and pay rise that rarely / never comes. Promotions are few and far between, there must be a backlog of 20+ current good staff who are overdue a promotion based on high performance but have not been rewarded with one. Even those who get promotions advise the pay rises are miniscule (circa 5% on average). 4 days a week in the office (and two being Friday's bizarrely) being mandated from April by WPP leadership will reduce flexible working as well as make people less productive and poorer. Another terrible decision by the leadership at WPP who are out of touch and making a myriad of unenforced errors leading to unnecessary high churn of decent staff. Avoid if you want a good work-life balance. Overall, investments in people have generally decreased - good perks like lunch vouchers, free snacks and vouchers as a Christmas bonus have been removed over the last 12 months as cost cutting has become the number 1 focus of WPP and by extension Burson.