PROS: Chances are good that your co-workers will not contribute to a future need for
anti-anxiety or other medications. Most of your co-workers will try to be
supportive. Generous vacation time as compared to other employers. You will need it, but you will also be discouraged from taking it!
CONS: Management. Most job stress is needlessly caused by
incompetent and insensitive management, widely-viewed by employees as having
been promoted to their current positions by virtue of political favor and/or
damage mitigation. Firing most of them would improve many stubborn issues
almost overnight. They’ll try to blame employees for the various failures and
unmet goals, but since employees are micro-managed and not trusted to think for
themselves, all train-wrecks start at the engine.
At typical workplaces, holding a door open for someone steps
behind you in a hallway is viewed as a simple courtesy. At this plant, however, courtesy extended to certain managers will
gain you a rebuke. “Don’t wait and hold the door for me; you have work to do!”
The five seconds winds up being used to poison attitudes, not get anything
additional done. This is the kind of
short-sightedness exhibited on an almost-daily basis.
The remainder of the job stress is caused by the constant
need for fire-fighting. Priorities shift by the hour, making planning one’s day
or anticipating project time allotments almost impossible.
People are not valued, and their experience is not valued. I
heard a top-level manager say this explicitly as he was walking down the
hallway past my cubicle, talking loudly on his cellphone, undoubtedly to
another high-level executive. Predictably, this piece of work was eventually
promoted. “If you’re not happy here, there’s the door,” was the keynote delivered
by the piece of work at of one of our employee meetings.
This is not a career move. Management has their turf
well-protected in an ever-circling Charybdis of transfers and promotions,
adulterated with outside acquisitions, while lower echelons stagnate and
struggle for crumbs thanks to performance reviews kept mediocre by the standard
of absolute perfection held to “everyone else”. A lot of lip service is paid to
talent management, but people with actual talent learn quickly that this is not
where they should be, and those who want to gain more talent are either going
to wait in vain, or have it go unrecognized.
There is a company
picnic, however. It is held on-site, and therefore has to be made as safe as a
four-year-old’s birthday party to avoid any potential litigation. Budget cuts
may mercifully euthanize this affront to good times. Employee’s families are
never invited to attend any company functions whatsoever, which is a lost
opportunity to humanize the workforce to their management overlords. Fun is
generally disallowed and viewed with suspicion. When management figures out how
to put fun on trial and burn it at the stake, they will.
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