Workplace reviews and discussion: 儷寶化粧品有限公司

1. The office environment is clean and tidy

2. Free coffee and snacks

3. $100 meal allowance

1. Employees have to take turns being assigned as the duty person

2. Both disciplinary actions and commendations are posted on the bulletin board. However, commendations are generally given only to the Sales Department; the reward systems for Finance, Administration, R&D, and Engineering are very unclear

3. A few managers in the Sales Department often speak very loudly in the office. They are usually arguing with the mainland China and Changhua factories, and they often yell loudly enough for the entire office to hear, affecting others’ work

4. There is no comprehensive employee training

5. Employees have to perform songs and play games to entertain everyone at Christmas

6. Regular overtime under a duty-based work system, with no overtime pay. Because of the time difference, the Sales Department often has to hold meetings with clients at night or on holidays, but there is no compensatory time off, profit sharing, or performance bonus (employees receive fixed salaries)

7. The Engineering and Sales Departments often need to travel to Changhua for business, leaving early and returning late.

8. Employee turnover is extremely high. There is an expression circulating privately within the company: “Normal and capable people don’t stay at this company.”

9. The company uses a mainland Chinese communications app called “DingTalk” for internal communication. Senior management often assigns tasks after work and on weekends

10. Basically, employees can be promoted as long as they have sufficient seniority, so the office is full of managers and team leaders (because turnover is so high, staying for one year qualifies you as a veteran). However, promotion does not bring any changes in authority or benefits; it only means more work. Authority remains concentrated in senior management (a common problem in family businesses). There have even been bizarre cases of people refusing promotions

11. Female employees are entitled to only three days of menstrual leave per year (although this complies with labor law, the vast majority of companies provide at least one menstrual leave day per month)

12. Apart from the $100 lunch allowance and bonuses for the three major holidays ($500 for new employees and $1,000 for everyone else), there are no other employee benefits (every company has a snack bar, so I suppose that does not count)

13. If you forget to clock in or out once in a month, you can correct the attendance record. The second time, you must receive a disciplinary warning before you can correct it; the third time, your perfect-attendance bonus is gone. In particular, forgetting to clock in or out is usually caused by an excessive workload—being too busy to eat lunch and busy working overtime, so you forget to walk to the entrance to clock in or out. This is a very inhumane policy

14. Parking around the company is extremely difficult

15. Senior management is very impatient. Although they say the company is replacing the old with the new, their methods of doing things, management practices, and thinking are actually very outdated

16. They are very fond of asking managers to create work procedures, perhaps to cope with the high turnover? However, employees are the foundation of a company, so if the root causes are not properly addressed, I believe no number of procedures will be useful

17. The environment is high-pressure, and many people handle matters emotionally

18. The average age of employees is relatively low, basically under 35. In any case, the company simply cannot retain people

19. Senior management is very impatient. Since this is a family business, some senior managers who started working at the family company immediately after graduation have difficulty winning people over because they have no idea what the outside world is like, yet they are always telling employees with extensive work experience how to do their jobs

20. At one point, the company even issued a notice specifying what had to be kept in the first, second, and third drawers of each employee’s desk. It is truly outrageous that they even control what is kept in the drawers

21. Employees must wear white or black clothing at work