Workplace reviews and discussion: 舒跑、御茶園、每朝_維他露食品股份有限公司

The benefits and bonuses are quite good. The annual employee trip is always overseas, and the bonuses for the three major holidays and year-end bonus are paid in specific months. In the Taichung area, they are considered higher than those at many companies.

The entire corporate culture can be summed up in one word: “old-fashioned.” Many internal company processes still lack clear principles, and the company even refuses to go fully paperless. The internal operating systems are roughly 20 years old and the company refuses to update them. Employees are required to wear uniforms to work (women wear white shirts and pencil skirts), and there is even morning exercise before work. The company culture is very traditional. The chairman has absolute power, and even small design drafts from the marketing departments of each brand, social media copy, and similar materials must be reviewed by him. Other members of management—for example, the vice presidents and department managers—have little ability to take responsibility (and their average age is probably around 60). All supervisors take pride in having been a major brand “back in the day,” but they do not readily accept negative advice or opinions about the brands. They may even label new members and younger employees as lacking ability, and so on.

In R&D and marketing, all beverage flavor formulas must suit the chairman’s taste (which is openly subjective). If he says it tastes good, it is good; if he says it is bad, it is bad. He is stubborn and does not readily listen to other people’s opinions. Even mid- and senior-level managers who have worked with him for many years need to make his preferences the basis of a project for things to proceed smoothly. Newcomers with different opinions find it difficult to fit in and are easily labeled as having poor sensitivity, lacking common sense, or lacking ability.

Brand marketing work is even worse. The marketing department is practically the company’s driving force. For every brand’s beverages—whether new product development, packaging and bottle prototypes, production planning, subsequent advertising, or sales performance—the departments are old-fashioned and all want to save themselves trouble, making it extremely difficult for marketing to move anything forward, let alone innovate or propose strategies and ideas to rejuvenate the brands. The chairman repeatedly says he wants to modernize the brands, but he has a high degree of control, and during the proposal process he judges everything subjectively based on his own perspective. He is also very emotional: if something does not match his opinion, he may get angry, slam the table, yell, or throw proposals. From a marketer’s perspective, he is essentially a client who is very difficult to communicate and discuss things with. His acceptance of innovation in marketing proposals is probably only a tiny 3%. Anything different from past practices is met with suspicion, yet he will turn around and criticize you for failing to create value for the company.

Taken together, this has fostered a situation in which the group’s senior executives and favored managers simply follow his wishes. They are generally unwilling to innovate or break out of the framework to do more for the group; following methods from decades ago is considered safe enough. If something goes wrong, they only need to push the blame onto the lowest-level employees. There have even been several cases in which lower-level colleagues were dismissed as scapegoats. As for what the mid- and senior-level managers normally do: they hold regular meetings to report departmental progress, then delegate the work to subordinates and try their best to protect themselves from being held responsible. Even when they themselves have signed off on a document, if problems arise later, they still hold subordinates accountable, asking, “Why didn’t you analyze this clearly before submitting the document, causing problems later?” If the company suffers losses as a result, subordinates are the ones who receive demerits or are dismissed, while mid- and senior-level managers spend their days drinking tea and coffee, chatting, and eating fruit.