Workplace reviews and discussion: 寬庭美學股份有限公司

The Ghost Festival is coming up, so it feels appropriate to post this. There are good points and bad points below; please decide for yourself whether it suits you:

．The company environment is pretty good and the space is comfortable. Most colleagues are also easy to get along with. Under normal circumstances, overtime usually isn’t necessary, and there is a flexible 30-minute window for starting and ending work.

．The work itself isn’t complicated, but there are quite a lot of reports: pre-work analysis and evaluations, post-work reviews, and weekly, monthly, and quarterly reports—you name it. If you’re not good at paperwork and reports, dealing with all this may be somewhat difficult. But if you think positively, working this way can also make you more organized.

．There are an incredible number of meetings, and some of them last a very long time (regular meetings start at two hours). I’m relatively lucky because of my job; some colleagues get called into meetings by the boss. The boss doesn’t pay attention to the time when calling meetings. Once, at 5:50 p.m., he said he wanted to have a meeting, which clearly meant it would run past the end of the workday. (I’ve tried it before, and you can actually tell your supervisor that you don’t want to stay too late. There’s also a chance you can decline the meeting or leave early, but it depends on whether you dare to speak up.) (I’ve heard that if you don’t cooperate, you’ll be blacklisted in front of the boss, but I think a blacklisted life is happier—it saves you from many opportunities to be emotionally manipulated.)

．You really can learn a lot, because you have to figure out many things on your own. Personally, I feel that my work skills improved significantly here, and I also developed many peculiar skills that I didn’t necessarily want, such as reading people’s expressions and the atmosphere. But if you don’t want to live such an exhausting life, once you’ve trained enough, you’ll probably look for another way out. Then, when searching for a new job, you’ll feel that anyone who can communicate properly is a good person, making it easier to feel satisfied and realize that happiness is actually very simple.

．Taking leave is difficult. Even if you’re only taking half a day off, you have to fully hand over the work your backup is supposed to do. Regardless of whether it’s urgent, you have to write it down for your backup to handle. (Usually, we try to rearrange things and only hand urgent or necessary matters to the backup, but the supervisor said that wasn’t acceptable.) If the handover isn’t detailed enough, the backup may be summoned and scolded, which creates psychological pressure for the person taking leave. Oh, later they also changed the rules: if you take more than three days of leave, you have to notify them one month in advance. (These three days include holidays; if you take Monday or Friday off, that counts as three days.) *People taking leave aren’t necessarily harassed, since the Labor Standards Act means they can’t simply refuse to approve leave, but your backup may have a hard time.

．In addition to the actual work, there are miscellaneous tasks, such as taking care of the office plants and going to the basement to empty the dehumidifier. When a plant is close to dying, someone will even come remind you, “Remember to take care of it.” If it dies, the boss will be unhappy.

．The company’s annual party requires employees to dress up and dance on stage. You have to buy the outfit yourself and pay for your own hair and makeup, and you can’t buy anything too ordinary—you’ll be criticized for not looking upscale enough, because the company considers itself high-class, so its employees can’t dress in a low-class way. (Then give us uniforms, seriously. You expect employees to pay out of pocket and still have so many opinions?) (And what era is this? Employees still have to sing and dance to entertain the boss???)

．Some of the boss’s relatives and other favored people always look sullen. It’s impossible to see where the supposed sophistication is; all you can see is arrogance.

Whether the above points are good or bad really depends. If you feel that you’re mentally strong and not easily emotionally manipulated or subjected to PUA, you can still take this into consideration.