Workplace reviews and discussion: 申錫企業股份有限公司

I joined the company on May 6 this year and worked until June 21, when the former quality control manager, who is now the production control manager, announced that I could only work until that day.

What I want to say is that although this company appears peaceful on the surface, there are actually undercurrents beneath it.

It is not merely a matter of the company’s owners changing generations or conflicts in their philosophies. From what I have seen, the general manager has no real understanding of the actual situation on the front lines, nor has he genuinely tried to understand it. He recklessly and unquestioningly gives his old classmate broad authority to do as he pleases, without realizing that the other person is secretly making a mess of things.

I am not deliberately talking nonsense here or writing this just to vent my frustration. Personally, I have nothing much to vent about; after all, I have always had terrible luck in the workplace, and I have long been used to this kind of nonsense. I simply feel it is unfair to the young general manager. Does he know that the real problems in his own company do not come from the front-line employees, but from the middle managers? As far as I know, in a healthy company, every department holds weekly meetings to review matters, employees communicate about work-related problems or share their opinions, and the managers then decide on solutions or follow-up actions. Yet this company has no such meetings at all.

My predecessor in quality control—the general manager’s old classmate—complained in front of everyone on my very first day that the general manager had brought me into the company without even letting him know. He did not receive the notification until the early hours of Monday, the day he was due to return to work. During my time there, he told me more than once not to inspect these things too carefully, because it would only create trouble for myself and generate more work. Even more absurdly, when I found problems during in-process inspections, he told me to ask the process department first and then ask him. Have any of you ever heard of quality control inspectors having to let their own process supervisor decide whether their company’s products are defective? Isn’t that having a player serve as the referee? This shows that this former senior colleague has no basic understanding of quality control.

That is only one issue. In fact, the lathe section leader on the production line was also a formidable, deeply calculating old hand. At work, he deliberately tried to intimidate me—he intentionally observed my inspection methods, then nitpicked and exaggerated problems to criticize me. When I was driven out of the company, that senior colleague accused me of “interfering with production processes.” I suspect that this serious accusation was also secretly suggested to the general manager by the section leader, because I never went to the general manager to tell him whether a machine should be started for production. Why would I interfere in that? It has nothing to do with me, okay? The logic simply does not hold. I had no motive to do such a thing. Besides, I had no grudge against that section leader, so there was no reason for me to use such tactics to obstruct him. Moreover, doing so would only have made it harder for me to establish myself at the company. I would have to be an idiot to do something like that.

In short, there are problems within this company, and the fundamental cause is the major gap in understanding between the general manager and the middle managers. If he does not communicate with front-line employees from time to time, he will never discover these problems.

That lathe section leader hinted to me more than once that I should turn a blind eye to the production defects I found. I always ignored his attitude and recorded the facts on the inspection forms every time. However, I believe these reports would never reach his attention, because they were process self-inspection records. Quality control had no separate inspection records, since my “predecessor” in quality control, who is now the manager, had no intention of seriously carrying out quality control. When it came to these matters, he always preferred to avoid trouble whenever possible. Does the general manager know about this? No, he would not know. What is more, the general manager never asked him to submit these inspection reports. If the reports remain only with the process department, anyone with common sense knows that they will never let the boss see the truth.