Workplace reviews and discussion: 環球購物中心股份有限公司

1. All rules and regulations are absolutely legal and compliant.

2. It is an unwritten rule that employees are never laid off, so staying until retirement is no problem.

3. The benefits system is very comprehensive. If you work at a profitable large store, the bonuses are usually pretty good.

4. Super suitable for newcomers to level up and see the harsh realities of society.

5. Senior employees are great at slacking off and can develop a side hustle (provided they let go of their shame and sense of responsibility).

6. There is a high proportion of young employees, so horizontal communication is usually not much of a problem (unless you run into someone who doesn't use their brain).

1. The company's largest department is the Finance Department. As long as Finance says no, it doesn't matter whether the budget has been allocated—if they say you can't spend it, you can't spend it. As a result, every department automatically turns into the Finance Department. (For example, when Department A is consulted, the purpose is to confirm whether a plan or design can be further optimized, but the department's response is: “I don't see any usable budget.”)

2. Continuing from the above, Finance basically has the final say on all rules and regulations. For example, something may clearly use Process B today, but when the same kind of thing needs to be handled next time, a bunch of new rules and missing documents suddenly appear. You often have to apologize to vendors because of this. (Finance just shrugs and says: “You have to communicate with the vendor yourselves.”)

3. The general manager basically never helps coordinate or resolve any problems. She only asks, “So how are you going to handle it?” (?) Even if you give her a complete solution, as long as the approach would make it difficult for her to report to the chairman, she will make things difficult, delay them, send them back for more information, and do everything possible to make you give up and absorb the problem yourself. The impression conveyed by all kinds of incidents, big and small, is simply: “Just don't let the chairman yell at me,” rather than “How can we help the company build its brand and increase sales?” (The group's quarterly meetings are basically live broadcasts of senior executives publicly dying of embarrassment; watching the chairman chew people out is strangely therapeutic.)

4. The HR department head only makes empty promises. One second, she tells you to swallow unreasonable work as training, saying that everyone must get through difficult times together and that the company values and appreciates you; the next second, when it comes to a raise, she says, “Please ask your direct supervisor to fight for it. There's nothing I can do—that's your supervisor's responsibility.” When a branch wants to hire more people, she pulls out the pitifully streamlined staffing plan and says, “We're fully staffed right now,” completely disconnected from the realities of the business floor.

5. The promotion and reward policies are only written to look good. The layers of screening are supposedly meant to select talent, but you waste time compiling a pile of documents, only to end up with a temporary section-chief or temporary project position for years, or simply get told goodbye. Meanwhile, people who belong to the right faction can get promoted easily with nothing more than a supervisor's signature.

6. Continuing from the above, factionalism is extremely serious. If you have a good relationship with the right people, even if all you do is yell around the branch over trivial matters and you can't do anything besides look at the numbers, you can still sit securely in an associate manager position or even get promoted and sent to the group headquarters.

7. Again, because of this, internal work information circulates extremely poorly. Everyone is afraid of the hassle and does not want to increase their workload, so nobody wants to consolidate anything. In the end, the same problems keep happening repeatedly, and when something major goes wrong, people pass the buck, issue disciplinary actions, and find scapegoats.

8. The company is incredibly exploitative toward vendors. Front-line staff are the ones who bear vendors' dissatisfaction anyway, while senior management simply does not care. Many good vendors and brands are scared away after working with the company just once, while a whole group of favored vendors is cultivated with extremely arrogant attitudes. Nobody knows whether anyone is going to solve the problem or deal with the people who actually do the work.

9. The chairman is clearly a capable and far-sighted person and is fairly kind toward front-line employees, but is genuinely terrible at choosing people, having appointed a bunch of strange individuals as senior executives.

10. Finally, when reporting overtime, they force you to take a half-hour break first. What kind of nonsense is that? And you have to apply in advance or it doesn't count? Then please ask people at headquarters not to request information right before the end of every workday, saying that it's urgent and that some general manager needs to see it at a meeting the next morning!