Future is Stuck in the Past - Anonymous employee Future Employee Review

2.0
11 Apr 2019
Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Decent benefits though forget about getting much of a raise Freedom to work from home Unlimited PTO

Cons

- Job doesn't feel secure - We live in a modern era where video conferencing, phone calls, and airplanes make it incredibly easy to stay in touch and accomplish much without a physical location. Right after acquiring Purch, they removed all the video conferencing equipment in the Utah building and later claimed they laid off the whole building because it was "too hard" to communicate with them. They claim they want a bigger presence in the United States yet they're consolidating all the US brands to a tiny space in New York where there isn't enough room to test the many products their sites claim to test. They're also putting more work on the shoulders of fewer people. - HR and IT have been incredibly consolidated and it takes way too long to get any kind of answers or help from them. IT is also overly stingy about putting necessary software on your computers. My boss needed to add Adobe typekit to his machine so he could get the needed fonts for the multiple brands we work on and he had to jump through tons of hoops just to get that done. They treated it with way too much suspicion - like he wanted to install something malicious. - Future has acquired a ton of brands in an incredibly short amount of time and made tons of decisions about those brands without taking the necessary time to do their research and incorporate them correctly. - Senior level management seems to care more about increasing the number of brands they have and building their monetization platform than building the brands and helping them flourish. Being primarily a magazine company, they also refuse to put more effort into social media - which is huge in the United States and an almost necessary platform for advertising and increasing traffic these days. - Future is overly stingy about money in the wrong places and doesn't care enough in the right places. When traveling, you often have to share a hotel room with someone else which just screams lawsuit in the making. They immediately cut off wi-fi in the Utah building when they laid everyone off and the handful of people who were staying on with the company had to pack up 100s of thousands of dollars worth of products and equipment in a week of time and donate much of it to thrift stores. Future could have saved more money by giving the employees time to sell the equipment. Also, several of the employees had to pull 12 hour days to get the products shipped out.

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Future Response
7y
Thank you for your review of Future plc. Earlier this year we made the decision to transfer our tech brand TopTenReviews, which operated out of our office in Ogden, to New York, and to close the office. While this was a hard decision to make, it was vital that TopTenReviews was no longer isolated from the rest of the company, and that the team could more easily benefit from local centralised support around SEO, deals content and testing. This was ultimately the best decision for the brand and for aligning the team with the rest of the company. As ambassadors for Future, our People & Culture and IT teams are on hand to help you whenever you need them and aim to respond to all queries within 24 hours. IT have also launched the new IT Service Hub where you can submit queries and immediately be designated a member of the IT team to help. If there is a valid business case for why you need a new piece of hardware or software, IT will always look into this for you. Future has expanded greatly over the last year due to both organic growth and acquisitions. We only acquire a company when we are sure that it fully aligns with our mission and portfolio. We appreciate that this represents change for a lot of people and know how important it is to integrate our new team members into Future. While there is still work to be done, we always listen to the feedback we get and have taken actions to ensure everyone feels part of the Future team. We agree that social media is a crucial part of boosting traffic and reaching a greater audience. Our Audience Development team plays a critical role here and works with all of our online brands to ensure they’re fully utilising SEO and social media. You can see this reflected in the Twitter followings of some of our biggest brands, such as PC Gamer and GamesRadar. We are also proud of our heritage as a publisher of magazines and believe that they are still a vital part of our success. Please reach out to the People & Culture team if you want to discuss any of these issues further at peopleandculture@futurenet.com

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