Fantastic mission, but company culture is dire - Anonymous employee Frontiers Employee Review

2.0
26 Jun 2024
Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Overwhelmingly the people are more intelligent, empathic and committed to the mission of the company than many other publishers. Truly remote with no expectation of office attendance. Really important mission of making science open.

Cons

The morale and culture has tanked over the last 18 months. As soon as the company's growth started to slow, immediately the blame was put on the staff on the front lines. They were just not working hard enough and needed to work harder! Then redundancies came and no pay rises in a cost of living crisis, shows staff are not valued. Manically trying to pry this back now they've realised this leads to significant exodus of talent which will impact the bottom line. 40hr work week, excluding breaks (norm is 9-5 with a paid lunch break, we're 8.30-5.30) means flexible working is difficult and by the end of the week many employees are mentally exhausted. A shorter week has been shown to be more productive. A previous reviewer mentioned unpaid overtime and the expectation of working at weekends- this is 100% the case in some teams, managers are expected to work until midnight on the final day of the month to push as many tasks as possible and ensure maximum performance against targets. Along with most of the recent reviews, the cons are lack of real leadership. There is a difference between being a dynamic company and adjusting approaches, and rushing releasing untested strategies or approaches which force you make constant U-turns or drop approaches after only a few weeks. Middle managers aren't trusted or empowered and the view is that the company is top-heavy with too many directors making responsibility unclear. Leadership don't take responsibility for their decisions, instead either gaslighting or just ignoring anything that doesn't align with their narrative. Leadership is not listening to the customers or the staff who talk to them everyday and evolving strategies or approaches, but instead sticking with the attitude that "it worked before so it'll work again".

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Frontiers Response
1y
It's great that you support our mission which is really important to us. We acknowledge your comments about morale - it has been a very tough year for everyone and we are committed to turning it around. To clarify, we operate a standard 40-hour work week that includes a paid lunch break and we never expect any employee to work overtime. Thanks for sharing your constructive advice and ideas for improvements - we will take them on board. Please do consider talking to your People Business Partner about how you can become involved in working groups on the projects you've mentioned.

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Pros

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