How is the work/life balance at Burson?

Diverse client roster, good team members, opportunities to work on large brands and campaigns.

Not a lot of rom for growth, below average pay, a lot of overtime hours and poor work life balance. Very top heavy and management often has no idea what their teams actually do.

Great co workers and fun teams, depending on what you work on.

Very minimal work/life balance, remote workers are very underpaid compared to those in office.

Nothing that outweighed the cons.

Just found this place to have a horrid culture. Some people will thrive here, and good luck to them. But if you're not thriving, it's nearly unbearable. Heed the warnings of cliques - they're rampant here, and if you're not in the in-group, you're made to feel it. Very little diversity, and no genuine commitment to it, either. Management will make a lot of noise about work/life balance, as many companies do, but in practice they make it impossible to maintain. Hours are already long - 9-6 - but grads working their first permanent roles were regularly doing 8AM-8PMs, some for months on end. Colleagues would talk about times they spent crying every day of the week, and management effectively telling them to suck it up - this is PR. Regularly at team meetings, management would announce that we were going through a 'crunchy' time, and act like acknowledging the workload did anything to alleviate it. Functionally, we were understaffed and paying for it with our mental health. You can't protect your own time either - in my experience and others, declining work results in someone going to your manager to check if you're telling the truth. Generally just lots of condescension to junior members of the team, who are treated like glorified interns, and made to prove themselves over and over and over. Micro-management was extremely intense here - there are countless spreadsheets to maintain devoted to keeping everyone and their dog up to date on what you're doing. Any error, no matter how small, will see you pulled up, to the point it's almost paralysing. Feedback can also stray into the very personal territory. Felt completely crushed by this place, and haven't looked back since I left.

I can’t think of a single pro.

Burson is an incredibly toxic environment that offers little to no training and zero work life balance. It rewards toxic and hostile behavior from colleagues. They retaliate when you share your concerns with rounds of lay offs. Stay far away.

Hard working team, opportunity to learn

Lack of work life balance

The that work here people are great and smart.

The work-life balance can be a challenge.

Work can be interesting depending on clients. Great office and good salary/benefits package. Stimulating and fast-paced.

Poor work/life balance. Management lacks leadership skills. Opaque governance. No team spirit, low motivation.

Seniors are kind, very real, caring, lots of advice and always approachable. Juniors are enthusiastic, eager to learn, lots of chatter: really brings the company together. There's no drama in the workplace, everyone's nice and friendly enough to hang out after work (a healthy amount). Wide range of accounts. Performance and capabilities wise would say they're at their peak, plenty of talents in the company. People are eager to grind. If you have a good manager that can speak up for you, it's easier to rotate accounts and grow more.

Sometimes long hours, and always chasing for new business, but such is agency life - if this deters you, you should not join an agency at all. Sometimes people here can be too kind, it is a thing.

Working-life balance - if you get into a good team Good working culture and people

It depends on the team. Not payable for overtime Limits of an agency

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.