Farsight Consulting

1.0

2 Apr 2020

Anonymous employee

Recommend

CEO approval

Business outlook

Pros

- The team are generally very talented, supportive individuals. Outside of the leadership team, I enjoyed good times and received good peer support from many of my colleagues. - Most of the team don’t have to work unreasonable hours (though this isn’t always the case). - Some people work on good, interesting client projects. - If you’re in favour, you can climb very quickly.

Cons

While I worked at Farsight, there were numerous times that people were mistreated by the Senior Leaders. Often people left the company as a result of their dealings with them. It sometimes felt that if these one or two “powerful” people at the top decided that they didn’t like you, or you didn’t fit the exact mould of person that they wanted, they would make your life very difficult until you quit. The leadership team would say that they have “high standards” and sometimes have to make “tough decisions” but I don’t think that suffices. I never got the impression that the leadership team found it difficult to make brutal decisions. Often I felt they relished giving negative feedback for the sake of it, in the name of “development”. It felt like they would push hard to find anything that they could critique about people, just to put them down and make themselves feel more powerful and in control. It felt a little bit like they weren’t satisfied unless there was someone that they were bullying and attempting to drive out of the company. I also felt that the senior team were biased in how they viewed various team members. Often it felt to me that you were much more likely to succeed if you were a particular type of person - e.g. a confident, white male. It felt like “favoured” individuals would have much less trouble getting the better projects, being promoted more quickly and generally having an easier time. Though the vast majority of the people being promoted were very talented and deserving, it often felt as though if you weren’t in favour, you would be more likely to find life very difficult. The leadership team would claim that performance is the only thing that drives promotion decisions but I don’t feel that this was the case. For example, women rarely seemed to remain in the company for longer than a year (except the senior leaders themselves). I know that lots of people get along fine at Farsight but overall I would say it’s not worth the risk if you’re thinking about going to work there. Also, even if you are “favoured” I’d question whether you could work for and respect such kinds of people - I ultimately decided that I could not.

Farsight Consulting Response

Thank you for taking the time to share your thoughts. We’re sorry that you didn’t personally enjoy all aspects of your time at Farsight. It is true that sometimes the leadership team have to make decisions that aren’t easy. We don’t make these decisions lightly and we always consider our team, our clients, and the business when making decisions. We’d welcome anyone to come and talk to us about any decisions they may have not understood, we’d be happy to explain and go through things. On occasions we have needed to give some people honest and difficult feedback about their performance and behaviour, when this hasn’t been in line with the standards and expectations that we think are important as a company, or with client expectations . Sometimes people don’t take this sort of feedback very well. We know it can be hard to hear constructive feedback sometimes and we do our best to work with people to help them hear that feedback and take other people’s perspectives on board. We don’t love giving people feedback that (for example) clients have said their performance falls short of what’s required, or that their behaviour has impacted negatively on others but it’s very important to us that we treat our team fairly and consistently in this respect. And we do think it’s important to encourage our team to take other people’s perspectives alongside their own, even if that feedback can sometimes be challenging for people to hear. It would be unfair on the team if we didn’t help everyone meet the agreed performance standards and behaviours. We aim to treat everyone with equal respect at Farsight and not to have ‘favourites’. We have a number of measures in place for key processes like promotions to make sure they are fair and transparent and also take into account different personality types – e.g. we have a mixed panel who assess promotion applications against pre-set criteria that is made available to everyone who is interested in applying for promotion. This approach was designed by a mixed group of people and has been well received by the team. We do recognise that in general women are underrepresented in the consultancy and tech industries. We are actively addressing this in Farsight by building on our best practice recruitment activities in order to attract women, making enhancements to our maternity policy, and supporting and developing our strong female role models at Farsight. For anyone reading this who is considering working at Farsight, we would encourage you to come see for yourselves. Ask us anything and if we can’t answer to your satisfaction, then maybe we’re just not the right fit for each other – and that’s okay.

I found the Management team very difficult. - Anonymous employee Farsight Consulting Employee Review

Explore other reviews about Farsight Consulting

Want the inside scoop on your own company?

Bowls

Followed companies

Job searches