Forrester Research Reviews

Pros

hard place to enter but welcoming people, good brand and some smart people

Cons

scattered in silos this company is run by analysts and thier goals are paramount. Sales plays second fiddle and it shows. no voice, metrics, metrics, metrics, metrics) suppossed to be a high end sales job, but most people are treated like call center jockies. If you thrive on process - you can be happy here, if you are a creative thinker and executive sales person, you won't fit and you and Forrester are better off without each other.

Advice to Senior Management

Mr. Colony is smart, but he is surrounded by some pretty poor leaders (maybe good managers) but poor leaders, no inspiration, and very low Emotional Intelligence.

Pros

- Friendly, fun, intelligent group of people to work with
- Great name to have on your resume
- Work-Life balance recognized

Cons

- In a word: Cheap
- You'll be given all the excuses under the sun regarding "budget cycles" and why wage increases are indefinitely held off.
- When faced with prospect of losing talent vs. paying more to keep them, they lose the talent.

Advice to Senior Management

Our "recognition awards" ceremonies consist of about 1/5 non-sales awards, then the rest sales oriented awards. It makes the 'non-revenue generating" employees (and we are constantly reminded of that) feel unappreciated and hyper aware of the rift between the salesforce.

It's a well known fact that in order to make more money at Forrester, the only way is to leave and come back. Fix that.

Pros

The people will keep you here. It's a fantastic networking world and the opportunity to learn, both about a professional work environment and about technology, is exciting and fast-paced. It's also a fun place to work - people are constantly going out and organizing meet-ups and events - you are guaranteed to run into other Forrester people out and about around Cambridge, Boston, Somerville, etc. I still have many, many friends and contacts from the time I worked here. Also the management is great about investing in professional training. The onboarding system (a full week of orientation and training) is phenomenal - it's a well-oiled machine from an HR/benefits/legal perspective. I miss this competence in other organizations since. Overall, I WOULD recommend applying to, interviewing at and working at Forrester - it really allows you to go to many, many other organizations and is well-regarded. Also the people you meet here will stick with you for life, there are just such incredibly fun, smart and funny people here.

Cons

Once you're in at a certain level it's almost impossible to get more than 3% more per year. So make sure you like your starting salary. It can be full of politics. They can decide they don't want to promote you for baseless reasons. I would caution anyone that while you can work here for a year before you switch roles/are allowed to apply internally for other things, that your boss will have a large role in determining your ability to switch jobs and when you come in to Forrester, be sure you're in a position that allows for upward mobility. Also the whole work/life balance thing can be a bit wonky - Q4 is insane for sales and consulting alike. You can work from home when you want, however you will be working 8:00am-9:00pm some days because there is just such a volume of work. Also, unrelated, the move to Alewife from Kendall is stupid and a complete deterrent to people wanting to apply here.

Advice to Senior Management

Don't punish people unfairly if their manager has a chip on their shoulder for seemingly no reason. When an entire team complains to HR about a manager, it's probably the manager, not the individual members of the team. Also - dear god, Forrester does not pay competitive wages. This has to be the reason 90% of people leave. ..

Pros

Love the intellectual freedom & integrity, love the work I do, getting to write and have strong opinions, love our customers & my interactions with them

Cons

This has become a company with too much politics, too many cooks in the kitchen trying to come up with an over-arching strategy, and not enough smart doers rolling their sleeves up and doing excellent intelligent work. Too much measurement and predicting of performance, and not enough performing. Management is cliquish, opaque and downright disrespectful at times. As an analyst, a frontline employee interacting with clients every day, I feel that I'm underpaid and undervalued.

Advice to Senior Management

Respect the judgement of the analysts you hire, pay them well and build their loyalty, and let them do their jobs without constant strategy shifts, new campy acronyms and marketing programs

Pros

-Looks good on your resume
-OK benefits package
-Corporate events
-Orientation at company headquarters (for global and U.S. based employees)
-The CEO will shake your hand at the new hire orientation
-Forrester will make you appreciate your next job

Cons

-Low salary
-Hard work not rewarded
-Keep increasing targets and goals every quarter
-Working overtime implied but not properly compensated
-Matrix oriented
-Slave Driver
-High turnover
-PTO generous on paper but highly discouraged
-Value Boy Scout mentality
-Totalitarian structure
-Very little freedom to interact with other departments and teams (need manager's approval for everything)
-Promotions based on favoritism
-Bonus determination very subjective
-No respect for employees regardless of experience & qualifications
-Employees are not encouraged to support each other
-Inefficient management
-Poor technology

Advice to Senior Management

Improvement areas:
-show more respect towards clients and employees
-invest more in company resources
-replace inefficient middle management
-be nice

Pros

working with very smart people with knowledge of both business and technology, and lots of opportunity to develop new ideas and grow within the company

Cons

lots of change, sometimes hard to navigate especially for people working in areas that overlap with areas of strength in acquired companies

Pros

-Smart people to work with
-Enterprise-level clients to gain insights from
-Can learn about what's up and coming in a given space

Cons

-Promotes like-minded thinking doesn't allow room for different opinions or ways of operating
-Favoritism versus meritocracy -- and this drives promotions
-Poor communication from management
-Business units don't have similar incentives and are often at odds with each other
-Not all analysts have real world experience
-Pay not aligned with market

Advice to Senior Management

More transparency across all coworkers; reward based on merit not who you like; provide better guidance to entering analysts and junior staff; actually empower your staff so definitely practice what you preach; allow for feedback across all levels within the organization instead of one managerial questionnaire a year.

Pros

- Fun, smart and creative people
- Good on-boarding

Cons

- Salary way too low for hours work. A chunk of your salary is done through quarterly incentive. If the company doesn't hit it's 'matrix' then no bonus is paid
- Job can often being very vague/overlapping with several groups
- Too much of your bonus is a matter of opinion instead of concrete facts
- Some people are very condescending
- Sometimes you wonder if people who are successful there ever have a moment of personal time

Advice to Senior Management

Try to get back the culture that made Forrester a place to work.

Pros

There are many smart people at Forrester and you learn from the best. There are opportunities to get involved in interesting projects.

Cons

The way employees are incented does not encourage collaboration at all. This is true among the analyst community who has to focus on meeting consulting goals and there's little incentive for them to collaborate with other analysts if they want to meet their aggressive quarterly goals. People are sneaky in order to preserve projects for themselves and in these cases, most certainly do not put the client first.

Sales people don't seem to care much at all what projects are good business for the company (i.e., can/should we do the work?). Their focus is solely on selling the project and moving onto the next thing and many of them don't seem to care about the success or failure of what was sold. Again, client is not first. Sales people are very aggressive and sometimes rude when working with internal teams in order to push their own agenda and make their quarterly number (i.e., raise or lower the price or complete something within a completely unrealistic timeline). When you don't work on commission, there is little reason to want to cooperate with people who use bullying techniques to get you to do what they want.

In many different parts of the company, there is zero work-life balance. In order to just keep your head above water, it's necessary to work most nights and on weekends. This is mostly because you're on the phone 6+ hours a day and every client call involves 2 internal calls (one before a client call to make sure the account team is aligned and another call following the client call to align internally on next steps). This severely cuts into each and every day and makes it nearly impossible to be productive during normal business hours. The feeling is that you are expected to be on-call in order to pounce on an opportunity.

The exception to this work-life balance seems to be the benefits department who work part time, never answer their phone, respond to emails, or assist in any valuable way. I probably would have been much happier pursuing a career in that department!

Management seems to understand these shortcomings but does nothing to rectify the situation.

Advice to Senior Management

Goals are way too aggressive and lead to internal strife since role teams are competing for the same dollars. Encourage more collaboration within the organization rather than competition.

Pros

The people is why I stayed at Forrester. We work closely in a team but they still give individual recognition for the work you've done.

Cons

I pretty much have a great time working at Forrester.

Advice to Senior Management

Let's do in-person company meeting every year!