Workplace reviews and discussion: 禾場國際有限公司

The only advantage: Most of the colleagues are nice, easy to get along with, and help one another.

Cons

1. The company has no policies; it is completely run according to whatever the boss happens to think of, and he may change his mind the very next second. No activity or plan is discussed or planned in advance. Employees are simply called into meetings, where the boss says whatever comes to mind. He goes back and forth without any clear objective or answer, and there is no clear plan. Meetings have no focus, he does not remember what he himself said, and he constantly contradicts what he said moments earlier. He does not write anything down and does things according to his own preferences, without carefully considering the consequences. For example, when opening up preorders for products—a confidential matter involving ordering that the boss handles himself—he opens preorders for every item before even confirming what products were actually secured. A few days later, he says that some items cannot be obtained, by which time customers have already started placing orders. In the end, employees are pushed forward to apologize to customers one by one. This has even happened after payment was collected, and customers were not refunded money but were instead given so-called store credit. Then, when the products were finally due to arrive three months later, it turned out that one item was also unavailable, while another had insufficient quantities due to overselling. A single preorder campaign resulted in three separate occasions where employees had to kneel and apologize to customers and issue refunds, while the person responsible acted as if nothing had happened. He does not plan properly and sends employees to deal with the consequences whenever something goes wrong.

2. The division of responsibilities is unclear. Every employee is expected to know how to do everything. Even if someone’s position is administrative, they are expected to know marketing, warehouse operations, and sales. One person is used as if they were ten people, and employees are expected to be on standby 24 hours a day; he seems determined to squeeze employees dry.

3. Employees still receive messages from the boss after work and on holidays. If they do not answer or reply, he becomes unhappy. He believes his questions are important and that he must know the answers immediately, regardless of the time, which is highly disrespectful to employees.

4. Gender discrimination. His words, both explicitly and implicitly, are full of discrimination against women—for example, saying that one has to be very careful when talking to women, or that women are not as capable as men. Yet the employees he hires are all women, and specifically young women. He then says that because they are still young, they lack social experience. He has even tried every possible way to dismiss female employees after they become pregnant.

5. Misrepresentation. The company name used in recruitment on job websites is Green Maze Cultural & Creative Technology Co., Ltd., but the actual employer is Hechang International Co., Ltd. The boss discriminates against all women, yet blindly idolizes a certain expert, A. He even describes Expert A as an “acupuncturist” in the course instructor introduction, although it is reportedly known that Expert A only holds a Class C beauty-care certificate.

6. Arbitrary dismissals. Whenever the boss dislikes an employee, he may dismiss them at any time. This company has been operating for nearly 20 years, yet its most senior employee has only two years of tenure. Either employees cannot stay, or they have all been dismissed by the boss. Even an employee who made a very direct suggestion to the boss was later dismissed under a pretext. All he wants are obedient robots who simply follow orders.

7. Because revenue was poor, he wanted to eliminate the part-time workers. However, the administrative supervisor and warehouse staff explained that their workloads were heavy and that they still needed part-time workers to share the burden, and they tried hard to communicate this to the boss. The boss only said, “I know,” and still went ahead and dismissed the part-time workers. One week later, he discovered that the workload really could not be handled with the remaining staff and wanted to recruit part-time workers again.

8. He only wants to use free options. Anything that costs money is avoided whenever possible. Everything is done through primitive, makeshift methods, such as using shared spreadsheets in free online office software. You cannot see any efficiency brought by high technology in this company; everything is manual, manual, manual!!

9. He does not trust employees. If a customer complaint is received, his first reaction is always to suspect that an employee did something to sabotage him. For example, when a customer reported that a product was like water, he suspected that an employee had put water into it! He is also extremely suspicious and distrustful of all employees, acting one way in front of people and another behind their backs.

10. All the equipment in the company is very old and outdated. Employees are expected to use the oldest, worst equipment to produce the best results, while he uses the best equipment himself. He wants the horse to run well but does not want to feed it. He then claims that he treats employees very well. There is nothing for Labor Day or the Dragon Boat Festival; he only says that he is good to employees, without taking any substantive action.

11. In short, the biggest problem with this company is the boss!