Naive and toxic - Operations Executive Beam (UK) Employee Review

- the general workforce (outside of leadership) are amazing, genuine, kind and skilled people. I loved coming to work and felt motivated to work hard in the interest of my colleagues. I’ve also made and retained friends at Beam and many others would say the same - really well organised company events including summer parties, Christmas etc - good tech - 3 days wfh and the ability to work remotely globally. they say you can work flexible hours and can work the hours of the remote location but in reality it’s a very fixed 9-6 UK time environment. you are looked down on if you’re seen to leave before (or at!) 6 but my guess is there’s a fair amount of performative working - you can have a pretty solid work life balance if you block out the performative work culture. it’s simultaneously a micro manage and hands off management approach, where as long as you’re visible on slack people will think you’re working hard. Put slack on your phone and go to the park!

- complete lack of company strategy at all levels makes it impossible to know what the focus is both short and long term. In the 2 years I was there, the mission changed at least quarterly - unable to retain staff. in early 2026 the retention rate for staff was less than 50% which means 1 in 2 staff would leave before they made it 12 months. I lasted 2 years and was considered an old hand. - sales targets are deliberately set to be un achievable, and leadership will openly say that they are stretch targets whilst penalising people for not meeting them. For a sales person, doing well at Beam means hitting 60% of your target - this doesn’t translate in the wider sales sector. Furthermore, if you hit your target - rather than celebrating, leadership will raise it as it was “too easy” - sales people regularly let go with no warning and no prior performance management. This is never communicated within the business, they are just deactivated on slack and disappear overnight - although this is somewhat normal in all companies - leadership have clear favourites who are overwhelmingly promoted, celebrated and remunerated above and beyond others. in general these are oxbridge grads. rumours are that only oxbridge grads are hired into leadership roles. - three SLT members and head of HR have no people skills and actively bully members of staff. COO renowned for making employees cry in meetings. Head of HR has no HR experience - pay disparity and lack of general company transparency - bi-annual engagement survey has no follow up. The last one I saw in early 2026 had terrible engagement scores and was literally not spoken about at any point by anyone in leadership. No accountability, engagement surveys are completely performative - benefits are being eroded over time but openly advertised roles reflect old benefits structure - highly performative, slack visibility based culture that rewards woo woo and criticises realism. To succeed you either have to be fully on board with leadership or come from a company that they respect (eg Palantir) There are so many more bad things to say about this company. My guess is that long term this company won’t succeed, which is truly a shame because they hire wonderful, competent people. I’ll be interested to see what happens for them - if I was on the board or a shareholder I’d be asking questions

- great pace of work (fast but satisfying) - energising culture, the people always challenge you in great ways - high performance is rewarded - leadership has become highly responsive to feedback

- quite rightly we’re very against spending a long time to think about things ( definitely a bias for figuring things out as we go) sometimes we could spend a little longer thinking!