Workplace reviews and discussion: 清河國際股份有限公司

1. The company has a gym (though compared with others in the same industry, it should be considered quite basic). Exercise can be counted toward performance evaluations, but there is a limit; for example, you can record a maximum of 400 calories per day.

2. The boxed meals at the Tainan plant are prepared by a central kitchen, so the dishes are better.

3. Management loves to paint rosy pictures, giving employees something to dream about.

4. The managers in the company’s marketing department are very willing to spend money on decorations. Currently, the work environment has been slightly beautified in “some” areas, but most of the focus is on their own department.

5. Beautiful female coaches are hired for overseas exhibitions.

6. The company is willing to spend money on foreigners.

7. The products have a differentiated appearance.

1. Training affects employees’ performance scores, yet employees are required to attend it outside working hours, “and overtime may not be claimed”! Most training sessions involve employees taking turns preparing and teaching classes, which is essentially exploiting employees’ working time.

2. After sales staff secure customer orders, the performance commission rate is very low (600:4).

3. Senior management considers working overtime a sign of dedication. Too few overtime hours will lead to criticism, but after you work overtime, they may question your work efficiency. If you work too much overtime, HR worries that you may violate the Labor Standards Act and will call you in for a meeting. Employees at the bottom are truly caught in a dilemma!

4. Most managers know virtually nothing about this industry, have no understanding of sports at all, and do not even exercise regularly.

5. The company has many petty rules. For example, employees on business trips must leave the company before 8:00 (the working hours at this company’s Zhongli plant start at 8:30). However, some employees traveling to the Tainan plant have to set out at 4–5 a.m. so they can enter the Tainan plant and clock in at 8:00 a.m. and appear on the surveillance cameras. Alternatively, they have to travel to the Tainan plant the night before and stay in the employee dormitory. All of this is simply because a certain manager does not want to pay employees for travel time during business trips. Other rules include not being allowed to eat breakfast during working hours and having to arrange your workstation according to 5S standards after work.

6. The quality of the employee dormitory at the Tainan plant is poor—worse than the lowest-tier budget hotels outside (NT$300–500 per night). Employees must bring their own quilts and pillows, and the mattresses are worn out (probably left behind by previous occupants). Some beds do not even have mattresses. There are 6–8 people per room in bunk beds, with only one bathroom on each floor across four floors. Men and women sleep separately.

7. The quality of the boxed meals at the Zhongli plant is inconsistent because the budget is only NT$60. The person at the ordering counter brings their own lunch, so they do not care whether the meals you order taste good. On several occasions, cockroaches, steel-wool scrubbers, and other things have even been found in the lunchboxes...

8. Employees’ performance scores are docked when projects are delayed, even though the projects are usually delayed by senior management themselves.

9. The company does not respect professional expertise and often challenges employees’ expertise. Therefore, you do not need to be particularly professional to join the company. When there are too many proposals, the senior PM does not understand them; when there are too few proposals, you have to stay on edge and always be mentally prepared for dismissal.

10. During the interview, they promised stable annual salary increases, but after joining, employees discover that the company uses all kinds of reasons and excuses to deduct performance bonuses and year-end bonuses. Salary increases also depend on whether the company has extra money that year! One year, excessive inventory in the United States caused a cash shortage, so everyone’s year-end bonus was cut and salary increases were suspended. However, this was a management problem within the company, not poor employee performance, and most employees were completely unrelated to the issue! When the company does not make money, everyone is expected to endure hardship together; senior management thinks it is fine if mid-year and year-end bonuses are reduced a little.

11. Salary increases are extremely small unless you have accomplished something extraordinarily groundbreaking.

12. A certain manager likes to talk about “environmental protection and energy conservation,” but often starts an old two-stroke motorcycle outside the company before work and leaves it running without riding it, forcing passing employees to breathe in the exhaust!

13. In the past, for the sake of customers and deadlines, senior management wanted to ship several products quickly even though they had not passed inspection tests. This left employees afterward to clean up the mess, and the company had to pay a great deal of compensation as a result. It is a very inefficient company.

14. You must be prepared to take on multiple roles, such as moving equipment weighing over 100 kg (carrying it from the second floor to the first floor and then from the first floor back to the second; a new employee previously suffered a work-related injury doing this), assembling equipment, and helping with other duties when staffing is insufficient.

15. Although the company is ostensibly a proprietary-brand manufacturer, its equipment research and development is unprofessional. It does not start from users’ needs or sports science, but casually puts existing equipment together and considers it an innovative design. Most products are driven by customer (distributor) demands rather than by the company’s own efforts to seek new or latent markets, resulting in mostly “me-too” products.

16. The company is currently the size of a small or medium-sized enterprise and already has major problems with employee management. Employees are also prohibited from discussing salaries or management’s actions, either publicly or privately. Senior management now wants to expand the workforce substantially, but it is hard to imagine how disastrous the company will be after expansion if it has not solved its management problems and cannot retain talent...

17. Decision-making suffers from a “multiple people pulling the cart in different directions” phenomenon. Sometimes, during proposal or issue discussions, the people at the top are unwilling to come forward and discuss matters themselves, forcing people below them to spend even more time negotiating with one another. This often results in wasted effort or schedule delays. In fact, management could simply discuss the matter directly, determine a direction, and then ask the employees below to execute it. Simply put, the people at the top often do not know what they want.