Workplace reviews and discussion: 玉言堂整合行銷股份有限公司

I stuck it out for a year. The following information should be enough to give new employees some reference~

1. The coworkers are very nice—the kind of nice where you can also become good friends privately.

Maybe because the company is really terrible, everyone shares hardships and supports one another.

Even when everyone has a lot to do, people still help each other out to some extent.

But please don’t “abuse” your coworkers’ kindness.

You should finish your own responsibilities; don’t dump them on your coworkers.

2. You can wear whatever clothes you want to work (unless you’re meeting clients, in which case you obviously need to dress formally).

I dress pretty casually myself; I’ve worn flip-flops and short skirts.

It’s not like some companies that are very rigid or have tons of rules.

3. There is a snack cabinet (but every month it’s basically just the same few things, so I really don’t want to call this a benefit).

The important point is that the snack cabinet is stocked by HR using the monthly welfare fee you pay (deducted from your salary).

4. Before the Level 3 epidemic alert (before May 2021), working hours were fairly flexible, and you could arrive after 10.

Because there was no clock-in system to begin with, most people entered the office between about 9:50 and 10:10.

(But the supervisors kept emphasizing that the company’s official start time was 9:00, while generously allowing everyone to arrive by 9:30.)

5. You can bring pets. The company originally had a cat and a rabbit, but both died this year.

Other than these five points, I really can’t think of any more advantages.

There are a great many disadvantages. First, I want to give one piece of advice to anyone interviewing or about to start:

⛔Please don’t be tricked into coming here and wasting your life. You deserve a better company and a better work environment!❕⛔

【Salary and benefits】These directly affect your quality of life, and this is probably what everyone cares about most, right?

1. The base salary discussed during the interview differed from the salary on the start date: I had several years of work experience and had also worked at an event company, so asking for NT$30,000 didn’t seem unreasonable, right?

But on the day I started, HR said it was only NT$28,000, with no guarantee of a raise. What could I say? During the pandemic I had looked for a job for three months without results, so I figured I would give it a try.

2. The promised holiday bonuses never arrived: Companies generally provide bonuses for the three major holidays. This was the first company in my life that didn’t give a Mid-Autumn Festival bonus, and none of the employees received one!!! You even had to ask privately. HR promised it would be paid with the salary, but when Lunar New Year arrived, it still hadn’t come.

3. They said the year-end banquet was being changed to a spring banquet—so where did the bonuses go? Some people may think that having a spring banquet at all is better than nothing, but the bonuses were not awarded because you did a good job or won a contract. You got them by playing games. The three supervisors (the boss’s wife, the planning supervisor, and the HR/accounting supervisor) also participated in the lucky draw, which means... you basically couldn’t get much money, and the supervisors absorbed the money themselves. ==

Someone will surely think, “At least you got some money—that’s good, isn’t it?” NO! Only a tiny portion of the bonus was contributed by the boss; the other few thousand dollars were solicited from vendors (and beforehand I had to ask the vendors for sponsorship money). The other small gifts were leftover materials from our various events,

such as reusable bags, a single mask, and giveaway pots that hadn’t been distributed. How unwilling were they to give us money? Did they really have to fob us off with this stuff? 😡😡

4. The legendary project bonuses: Only a tiny number of people at this company have ever received project bonuses—and it definitely wasn’t us.

I stayed for a year and brought in several major projects for the company. During execution, I didn’t care how much I had to work or how many nights I had to go without sleep.

But many former employees also left because they were never given project bonuses, and management even said, “We don’t have money to pay them.”

【Management and systems】The Gemini male general manager is two-faced and full of empty talk, and he is accompanied by a marketing director who can’t manage anything and a planning director who does nothing but eat all day.

1. Constantly changing decisions: Because this is a family business, they are always trying to figure out and discuss how to hire and manage people.

But everything is established according to the boss’s wife’s “understanding.” For example, even though the work is supposedly based on responsibility rather than fixed hours, employees are still required to arrive at a certain time and take lunch until a certain time—in plain terms, “clock in when you start work, but take responsibility for everything after hours.” The planner knows the proposal process best, but still insists that employees follow a different SOP every day, making everyone constantly readjust and comply. The boss even says, “Remember to raise any difficulties you encounter; we can discuss them,” but in practice, once you raise an issue, they simply change things in a way that makes your work even harder.

2. Supervisors lack ability: Besides the boss, who only draws grand visions and talks nonsense, his wife—the marketing director, hereafter called the boss’s wife—is also an incapable supervisor. A good project controller would not let everything wait until the last minute, cause things to fall through, or make clients point out all the problems. This boss’s wife’s habit is to avoid working properly during the day, prepare to pick up and drop off her children at around five, and then start bombarding everyone after midnight. That’s right! At 3 a.m. on a workday, she would send an entire row of messages telling you to revise copy or presentations. Couldn’t these things be handled during working hours? If you didn’t reply, she would get angry; if you asked her about something the next day, she would leave you on read.

Then afterward she would say she forgot to reply or was too busy, so she handled it herself (then what was the point of having her manage it?).

From experience on many projects, budgets had to be reviewed by her, and outsourced work needed her approval.

But very often, even when the client said something was OK, she insisted on changing it, causing delays, preventing vendors from completing the work, and ruining the event.

When buying DIY props, supplies, and all kinds of odds and ends, she would compare prices to death and still think everything was too expensive. In the end, she would place an order herself for very cheap Taobao products with terrible quality. Then the items couldn’t be used at the event > the event failed > the client got a bad impression > we had no chance of getting the project the following year.

It’s a vicious cycle. I don’t believe a capable person would drag in a pile of excuses~

Her way of doing things was extremely rigid. She didn’t trust the people underneath her even when they knew how to do the work, insisting on following her steps, and the final result was not what the client wanted.

Yet we employees were still the ones who got scolded.

The other supervisor was the “planning director,” the boss’s wife’s best friend and also the boss’s senior or junior from school—in short, a relative or crony.

She was only responsible for the “proposal” stage and did not execute events, so it goes without saying that she didn’t know how to respond to many situations that actually occurred.

She could set the budget however she wanted because she wouldn’t have to take responsibility later. It didn’t matter if the company lost money; there was always money to make up for it.

Why didn’t she have to handle execution? Because she had previously had mental health problems, and years ago, while executing a project, she fell out with a client and simply left the group. After evaluating the situation, the boss decided to let her handle proposals only.....

(How wonderful. I even suspect they’re having an affair; otherwise, why would this kind of useless person still be at the company draining everyone? Do they have too much money?)

The key point is, do you think her copywriting was actually any good? Clients didn’t even use the press releases she wrote.

This year, for several projects we proposed with her, she was wishy-washy about whether she would write anything and couldn’t be bothered to participate in discussions.

Of what she produced, 50% was copy-pasted, 30% was written with help from rookies, and 20% took her four days to write four pages.

(We employees were expected to finish in one day, but a supervisor could take four days to write four pages? What a double standard.)

There was also the supervisor who handled HR, accounting, and equipment, who was the boss’s older brother.

Salaries were not paid on time, vendor payments were delayed, and when vendors called—even when he was sitting right there—he told us to lie and say he wasn’t there.

After I resigned, I asked him for my employment separation certificate, National Health Insurance transfer-out form, and salary statement. He took two weeks to provide them (and I had to keep frantically messaging him on LINE to remind him; otherwise, he showed no intention of handling them).

3. Uneven allocation of manpower: Working overtime until the last train was routine, but I had no idea what we were frantically busy with.

This was related to what I mentioned above. Basically, everything submitted always had to be revised for 7,749 days before it could be shown to the client.

Then the clients—mostly government case officers—would take several weeks to review it, so we ended up in a state of explosive busyness every day.

But in reality, there was no actual progress on any work.

Project proposals always described everything perfectly: who would make the phone calls, who would publish the posts, and so on.

But in the end, you were the only person holding the whole situation together. You had to handle the client, vendors, coworkers, part-timers, and every tiny detail at the same time.

Even when you reported this to the supervisors, it was useless, because they all thought, “This isn’t urgent; we can put it off,” “Isn’t this something you can finish in two hours? Why does it take four?” or “You should be able to finish this yourself; there’s no need to assign a part-timer.”

With this kind of attitude, how are you supposed to serve clients well? You just laugh with relief if you manage to finish successfully. Basically, many government agencies and people in the industry already know that Yuyan Hall has a terrible reputation and works extremely slowly. Vendors are even afraid to work with them again because they worry they won’t get paid.

4. Overreaching: Some projects clearly required resources that Yuyan Hall didn’t have or involved work it didn’t know how to do—for example, the “Green Living Festival,” art curation tenders, large-scale concerts, or architectural and visual-design tenders. They didn’t even know any installation-art professionals or experts who could endorse them, so how were they supposed to win these projects? Moreover, supervisors would often lower the budget first because they wanted to win a high-value project, or find some random expert (just to get past the proposal stage), creating the impression that “Yuyan Hall has the ability to do this, and we’ve already coordinated with this expert.” In reality, they had nothing. The budget might be only NT$100,000, while the expert or vendor’s minimum price was at least NT$200,000. You can imagine how disastrous things would be after winning the bid, right? It wasn’t that we didn’t say so; it was that when we said it would cost that much, the supervisors still resorted to any means necessary to win the project. Once execution began, we would discover that there wasn’t enough money, and that we could hire only two part-timers when we needed ten. My advice is to do only as much as you’re capable of doing. There’s no need to show off or dream of winning projects worth tens of millions; winning one and then doing a poor job and ruining your reputation is not better~

5. They don’t make good use of employees’ individual strengths: I assume everyone introduces their areas of expertise during interviews, or supervisors ask, “Do you have any strengths that set you apart from others?” Surely the purpose is to let everyone perform their respective roles in an “integrated marketing company,” make the best use of their abilities, and ultimately help the company grow steadily, right? But this company didn’t make good use of anyone’s strengths. Again, it was a management problem. The interview sounded great, but in reality they were desperately short-staffed and simply wanted a “young pair of hands” to come in and do miscellaneous work. It didn’t matter what you could do. Maybe at that moment they needed someone who could edit videos and write proposals, so they recruited me? But honestly, my strengths were marketing, coming up with interesting events, and packaging an overall concept. Yet the supervisors always made me do extra tasks, such as drawing post graphics in PowerPoint (isn’t that what designers are supposed to do?), making phone calls for several days (even though they could hire part-timers, they said there was no money and told us full-timers to make the calls ourselves), and managing the website (fine, I get it—integrated marketing means they expect you to know a little of everything). Then the supervisors also didn’t respect professional expertise. You were hired because of a particular ability, and you knew best what the results of your work would be and how it needed to be adjusted, but they would limit and interfere with you by saying things like “This should be done this way” or “You should be able to do it faster,” based on only a partial understanding. It wasn’t just the planners; the designers were fed up too. Designers must have felt it even more strongly. Aesthetic matters are inherently subjective: the supervisor might dislike a literary or artsy style, but the client might love it! If the supervisor spends several days changing it, and the delivered work isn’t what the client wanted, aren’t we just wasting everyone’s time?

6. They don’t care about employees’ safety: Writing this point has made me angry all over again 🤬🤬

A good company makes you feel safe. If the systems and salary are already poor, then at the very least the bottom line should be protecting your safety and health, right? In mid-May 2021, Taiwan raised the nationwide alert to Level 2, and the pandemic continued to worsen until it was raised to Level 3. Many companies announced various workplace measures or subsidies for commuters as soon as they learned what was happening on the front line. After all, an office could easily have more than ten people, not counting the dozens of other people in the building. People weren’t accustomed to wearing masks, and during Level 3 it was genuinely frightening; we were terrified of getting infected. Yet the supervisors at Yuyan Hall acted as though it was no big deal, merely complaining that the pandemic was serious and there were so few projects. They never discussed whether employees could work from home (WFH) or whether there would be any other company policy...... It wasn’t until the private employee group chat was in uproar and someone asked the boss in the main group that the boss finally started discussing it. ==

In the end, it was after 11 p.m. that they finally posted a long announcement about epidemic-prevention measures (what time to start WFH, reporting progress on LINE, taxi fare subsidies for coming into the office, etc.). During the most serious Level 3 period, the boss’s wife still made us come into the office every few days just to revise copy (for f***’s sake, something that could be done at home—did she really need to see employees in person before she felt reassured?), completely disregarding employees’ lives and safety. Think working from home was easier? Completely wrong 🤣🤣 We were basically on call 24 hours a day. When a supervisor sent a LINE message, you had to reply instantly or they would get furious; when you asked them for information, you couldn’t get a response all day. Because bids had to be submitted to locations all over Taiwan, we planners often had to drive there ourselves. Even though management knew submissions were due at 5 p.m., they loved making changes at the last minute and then making employees speed. Fortunately, we all made it back to the office alive 😏 On several occasions, we genuinely couldn’t reach the site in time and missed the submission. The supervisor’s first response was not concern for the employee’s safety, but to yell, “Why didn’t you revise it earlier?” then tell us to drive back to the office quickly and hold a review meeting, with a review report due that night...... @#^&*

7. No sense of time: This was also related to the above. Basically, they didn’t work properly during normal hours, then seriously harassed employees after midnight.

They would agree on a delivery date with the client, but always liked to delay it until the last minute or submit late. The most absurd thing was that event companies inevitably have to go out with supervisors to give presentations. Waiting downstairs at the supervisor’s home was one thing, but when we agreed to meet at 8:00, the supervisor always arrived late (claiming it was habitual lateness, so from then on you had to schedule the meeting earlier and call the supervisor to come down so that you wouldn’t arrive late to the client). Is that even normal?

Anyone who has ordered from Taobao may understand that delivery times there can be unpredictable. If it’s urgent, it’s best to buy in Taiwan, even if it costs a tiny bit more. But the boss’s wife is an extremely stingy Taurus woman, so after you finally compared prices, she would at last remember to place the order—while overlooking the shipping time. This caused us to be short of large quantities of essential supplies right before several events, forcing her to urgently mobilize all employees to restock at shopping malls throughout Greater Taipei. ==

8. The industry knows how stingy they are: It’s true that event companies have high expenses and that, with many employees to support, it makes sense to save money on various costs.

But the boss’s wife is so stingy that even farmers in Chiayi and major audio-equipment vendors know her. She haggles over even small amounts of money (a few thousand dollars), until people no longer want to work with her, or would rather cut back on goods and services in every possible way than accept a price she doesn’t like.

She treated employees even worse. In my first week at the company, I went to Alishan to provide support. I will never forget that, as a woman, I ended up sleeping in a gas-station employees’ dormitory with my male coworkers, simply because the company wouldn’t let us stay in a hotel (and no B&Bs were available).

Once, a coworker was driving the company car to mail a large batch of letters and received a ticket after parking by the roadside. The company actually told her to pay it herself, and also told the rest of us that if we were ticketed in the future, we had to state which project it was for and the amount would be deducted from our salaries....

WTF 🤮 Who would dare help the company mail letters or deliver project materials after that? We didn’t have enough staff, so we could only handle everything ourselves, and they couldn’t even be understanding enough to refrain from saying this?

In short, there are far too many disadvantages, and I could share many more details, but perhaps nobody wants to read them.

At one point I even considered suing, but I had also heard that around 80% of labor disputes are won by employers, and lawsuits are expensive in the first place.

As a wage slave, I didn’t have enough money to spend fighting someone born with a silver spoon, so I gave up. I decided to stick it out for a year,

to give myself a complete explanation before leaving (I still saved all the evidence, just in case I need it someday).

To keep more people from wasting their youth, draining their energy, and damaging their health (my health was already ruined because I couldn’t eat or sleep normally),

I’m warning all younger people and experienced workers looking for jobs: do. not. come❗❗❗ Don’t even go to the interview~ This place is unbelievably awful.