Workplace reviews and discussion: 帝寶工業股份有限公司

1. Convenient transportation

2. Annual salary increases (ranging from 500 to 2,000; a 2,000 increase is relatively unlikely)

3. Normal working hours (officially; in practice, it’s not that simple)

4. In addition to the year-end bonus (usually 45–60 days’ worth, paid in three installments), employees who have completed two years receive an annual bonus (approximately 20 days’ worth)

5. Stable business performance, so the company probably won’t go under easily

5. Colleagues generally get along fairly well

1. There is an exam every month on the company’s products. If you perform poorly, management will take notice, and occasionally everyone’s scores are displayed on a screen during meetings and criticized.

2. Officially, work ends at 6 p.m., but due to explicit and implicit pressure from management, everyone clocks out first and then returns to continue working. Of course, if you’re thick-skinned enough, you can leave on time; you’ll know what I mean after attending a meeting. A famous saying: “If you’re in sales, you leave when it’s time—what kind of sales professional does that?”

3. Overtime must be requested in advance and compensated with time off (there is no overtime pay), and the request must go through multiple levels of approval. A famous saying: “The company pays for you to have lunch with clients, and you don’t even reciprocate? You want to apply for compensatory leave just for that?”

4. Employees have to clean the office themselves, with assigned areas of responsibility.

5. Once a week, employees must start work 15 minutes early for the weekly meeting.

6. You need to be highly tolerant of being berated and train yourself not to be affected by it.

7. There are a great many reports to prepare.

8. Sales staff handle everything under the sun; their work is not finished simply by taking orders and collecting payment. They must also be involved in inventory management and production management.

9. There are almost no benefits such as company trips.

10. There are surveillance cameras aimed at employees in various corners of the office.

11. The company has no SOPs; whatever management says goes. But when something goes wrong, they claim they never gave such an instruction. Also, this company has no sales department—instead, everyone is the manager’s sales assistant. Sales staff’s duties include entering data, chasing the factory for updates, booking shipments, and putting management’s verbal instructions into writing and emailing them to customers. Once the customer replies, they have to ask management how to respond. If the response does not please the manager, be prepared to be yelled at.

12. Unreasonable demands of all sizes occur frequently. What is frightening is that this has become part of the company culture: frontline employees all remain silent and comply. For example, as mentioned in point 2, everyone knows that they can clock out at six but cannot leave, yet they still laugh and rush to clock out, afraid of missing the company-mandated clock-in time. Perhaps after being oppressed for so long, this is the only way they can survive at the company.