Workplace reviews and discussion: 益群創意股份有限公司

1. For an experience design unit, you can learn all kinds of design skills and research methods. Because there is only one designer, this person is responsible for producing all design materials for the entire group, including interior soft-furnishing design for the office workspace, UI/UX design, graphic design, animation design, and more. You also have to produce various user research reports, and can even design CIS applications specifically for the chaebol group’s founder couple and their family. It practically develops your design potential to the extreme. If you enjoy challenging yourself with diverse design work and becoming an all-purpose designer, this is definitely the place to choose.

2. Free afternoon tea is provided every Monday and Thursday (either one pepper bun or one Hong Ruey Jen sandwich). The founder considers this an excellent employee benefit.

3. You get to see how the chaebol founders spend money; your breadth and height of perspective on life will become different from that of ordinary people.

4. There is not much workplace political infighting, because the staff move forward together with a unified goal: serving the founding couple.

1. No overtime pay; it is nominally an American company but actually operates under Taiwan’s responsibility-based system.

2. An omnipresent access-control system—even the restrooms have access control. Exactly how long and how many times you use the restroom are recorded.

3. Overtime must be planned and reported to your supervisor in advance before you can apply for compensatory leave (this was the first place where I learned that overtime could apparently be predicted). Are they psychic? This completely violates the Labor Standards Act.

3. The parent group of this consulting company is Yuanfeng Zhongtai. The Yuanfeng Group contains many small and medium-sized enterprises that claim external members need to undergo transformation: the See Taiwan Foundation, the Wen Sheng Ren Cultural and Educational Foundation, the Science Service Association, and Xunwei Co., Ltd., which was just closed down at the beginning of this year. The stated corporate philosophy is to help Taiwan’s small and medium-sized enterprises transform, but it is unclear exactly which external SMEs have been helped or what transformation they underwent, because all the members on the platform were established by the founder himself. It is therefore conceivable that the clients of Yiqun Creative Consulting come from platform members established by the group founder (insiders), so the consulting company has no experience working with external clients.

3. The entire company revolves around serving the chaebol founders and their spouse and catering to their various needs.

4. There is an unwritten rule: wait until someone has stayed for three months before getting to know them, because the staff turnover here is as fast as a waterfall. Job seekers with ambitions and ideals do not stay here for long.

5. The year-end bonus is fixed at one month. If you want a larger bonus, you have to write a lengthy performance report, supported by images and documents, proving your great achievements over the year. Yet the founder is only willing to give an additional 0.5 month at most, and may ultimately give nothing based on an impressionistic score (the performance report is essentially written for show). Therefore, smart long-term employees switch to contract positions (which do not require performance evaluations) and no longer let performance reviews for an inadequate year-end bonus hold their lives hostage.

6. There are no year-end parties or spring banquets. If there is an event, it consists of a series of competitions that wear out the employees; the first-place prize is at most NT$500 per person.

7. During the Lunar New Year period, the founder cannot wait to ask employees to work, keeping them busy throughout the holiday.

8. Employees are very afraid of company trips. One year, on a three-day, two-night company trip to Singapore, they did not even see the Merlion; all they remember is writing a pile of reports in the hotel conference room.

9. The unit or department must purchase unwanted design and production materials from the chaebol couple’s family, while packaging this as one of the employee benefits.

10. In personnel transfers, without the consent of both parties, employees may be forced to transfer to another unit outside their area of expertise, with the aim of forcing them to leave voluntarily and saving on severance pay.

11. When they want to force you out, your supervisor will send the founder confidential observation diaries every day documenting your poor work performance (some accusations are fabricated), while also sending them to you. Those being monitored are driven to mental breakdown and leave on their own (again saving on severance pay).