Review: Nameless Corporate Workplace

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.