Workplace reviews and discussion: 美麗人生產後護理之家

1. Lunch and dinner are provided; they are thoughtfully prepared employee meals.

2. Colleagues and all departments are easy to get along with, and there is a warm atmosphere of mutual assistance.

Management is also easy to get along with. The chairman, CEO, and secretary are all considerate of employees.

3. The company environment is very good.

4. Employee benefits are very good.

Direct supervisor of the Planning and Graphic Design team—the Planning Manager: In response to the first-floor post, she is still completely difficult to get along with, without any change at all.

1. Frequently uses emotional manipulation:

The manager always likes to say, “I’m only setting such high standards because it’s for your own good...”

She also often says that if we cannot meet them, we are not the people she wants, and tells us to get our own resignation forms, among other uncomfortable remarks that come one after another.

2. Strange work procedures

Tasks assigned by various departments come directly to the planning staff.

The specialist then reports to the manager, contacts the relevant department supervisor, and reports back to the manager again. The report must also be presented to the manager in dialogue form, word for word (especially when it involves matters concerning the Administration Department).

Have you ever wondered why the supervisors of the various departments do not directly communicate matters requiring cross-departmental assistance to the manager, who would then assign the tasks?

Later, I learned that it was because none of the departments could communicate with her.

Therefore, assignments from the various departments go directly to the planning specialist, which also creates strange procedures and leads to constant time spent reporting.

The manager also often gives instructions without understanding the situation clearly.

3. SOPs based on personal discretion

Policies change from day to day. She talks about SOPs, but in practice changes them according to her mood.

She may announce something one day, have us follow it the next day, and then say that we should have applied our own judgment.

It is completely unclear what the standards are.

4. Control freak

Every day, we have to write precise work logs, down to the minute and second, stating what we are doing.

If a period of time seems unreasonable to her or the work she wants has not been produced yet, she will question what we are doing?!

If the work log is not updated constantly, we will also be repeatedly questioned about what we are doing.

She says she likes people who have ideas, but in practice she only wants people who obey and do things according to her ideas. We are expected to have ideas while also obeying.

She cannot accept people whose ideas differ from hers; otherwise, she considers them to have insufficiently deep thinking.

When speaking with people from other departments, everything, no matter what it is, must be reported truthfully,

to avoid putting the department in danger or causing the supervisor to lose the ability to make judgments.

But sometimes it may not concern work at all—perhaps it is just chatting about whether to have coffee or something similar.

If we do not mention it and she happens to see or hear it, she will interrogate us about who said what to us just now.

5. Endless questions and endless reflections to write

Every day, she asks a pile of bizarre questions, and regardless of what you are doing or how urgent the project in hand is, you have to reply within five minutes of being asked (what the original poster said above is true).

Just responding to the manager’s questions may take up half a day.

She frequently shares articles and requires us to submit reading reflections afterward.

There is nothing wrong with sharing articles; we can absorb knowledge and learn from them.

Our colleagues often do this with one another as well, but we only share with each other.

We do not dare share with the manager, because we are afraid she will forcibly require us to write a reflection report again.

After six months and one year of employment, we must separately submit onboarding reflections and growth reports.

The content is essentially required to praise the manager for how dedicated and capable she is at managing people.

She always thinks she is very good at leading people, but in reality, she is not.

6. Even following previous examples leads to all kinds of criticism

Because the department has a very high turnover rate, in the five years since the company was founded, it has probably gone through more than ten planners.

Aside from the manager, there are no senior employees to train or guide others.

(The manager herself has no practical skills in AI, Photoshop, video production, and so on.)

Therefore, we can only create materials ourselves by following the direction established by the images and text left behind by previous employees.

But images and copy that the manager previously approved may be criticized and sent back for revisions based on all kinds of strange requirements when we submit similar work.

Because she lacks relevant aesthetic sense or skills, she can only offer extremely strange suggestions that are impossible to accept.

Her copy suggestions are also the kind that only older people would relate to.

After all, she is nearly 60 and is not even in the target demographic for a postpartum care center,

yet she still uses her own thinking and refuses to listen to the people below her.

7. Disorganized data, records, and files

The SOPs are terribly written, yet the manager still considers them records painstakingly left behind by previous employees.

Looking at an SOP alone, it is completely impossible to know what needs to be done, where to start, or where the files and data are stored.

The shared drive contains mixed-up data, with no filing or archiving logic whatsoever.

The manager is afraid that specialists will delete all the data when they resign,

so she has restricted permissions so that only she can delete things from the shared drive.

But she has also failed to establish any rules for archiving.

The entire folder structure and computer are a complete mess.

There is no practice of scanning and creating digital records, so there are piles of paper documents.

It is entirely possible that anything you need will be impossible to find.

Every time you look for a file, you feel it would be faster just to recreate it yourself.

8. Self-important

The manager often compares herself to the chairman, claiming that she has the same way of thinking.

She believes she can predict everything and that everything is under her control,

but the facts are often completely different from her guesses.

No one wants to tell her much about the facts either, because the manager is somewhat paranoid and prone to imagining persecution.

She makes a huge fuss over everything and escalates even the smallest matters indefinitely.

9. Endless meaningless meetings

We have to attend meaningless meetings almost every day.

At first, she repeatedly indoctrinates new employees by recounting her own great achievements.

Later, even after she has nearly finished talking about those achievements,

we still have to attend meetings—for minor matters, to vent her personal emotions,

or to scold people. She holds a pile of boring meetings that waste time.

Once you go in, you are guaranteed to be there for one, two, or three hours, accompanying her in conversation.

Every meeting leaves people feeling very uncomfortable.

Because so much time is spent holding meaningless meetings,

there is not enough time to finish the work that actually needs to be done.

We are not allowed to work overtime at the company to finish it

(even voluntarily without claiming overtime pay, because the manager thinks it would waste the company’s electricity and air-conditioning resources

and create a bad impression when other departments see it, making them think our diligence is merely an act).

So we continue working nonstop after leaving work.

In any case, if the work is not finished, it means our ability is inadequate.

10. The “old flame” syndrome

She always thinks people from the past were better and compares current employees with former employees in everything.

But judging from the data, image files, and copy they left behind, they were not as capable or impressive as she claims.

If another department praises the current staff as being better,

she immediately calls a meeting to praise the achievements of the former employees, then tells us not to think we are doing such a great job.

11. Constantly shares matters related to gods, Buddhas, and religious beliefs

The manager believes she has a special constitution and extrasensory perceptions, so she constantly uses her own feelings as the basis for judgment.

For example, when interviewing candidates, regardless of whether their education and experience are suitable for the job, she decides whether to hire them based on unfounded intuitions,

rather than on the actual work they have produced or their qualifications.

The manager most often says, “It’s here, it’s here! I’m sensing something.”

Once, as an experiment, I gave the manager completely false information.

She still replied that she was sensing something, and at that moment I thought, “Well, let’s not talk about superstition and supernatural forces.”

Overall, this job requires someone with very strong stress tolerance.

Everything at Beautiful Life is good; it is truly only the Planning Manager who is difficult to get along with.

If the Planning Manager resigned, this job would be perfect~~~

But because of this difficult experience, after leaving the job, when I encounter people who speak harshly or stressful situations, I no longer feel that it is a big deal.

The pressure and discomfort of working with the Planning Manager at Beautiful Life were much greater—it was also a kind of stress-resilience training camp.