People working in small companies and running own businesses always think working in corporate companies yield much better returns. This may be partially true for the amount of money one can earn within safer boundaries. But the life is not only about money and people end up in learning or doing crap things just to hold their corporate status. When you work in corporate company, you will understand from the lowest level employee to the highest level executives do inappropriate things to hold or improve their status.
10 Funny and Bitter Facts About Corporate Culture
Here are 10 funny and bitter facts about corporate culture.
1. Emailing
It is common among corporate employees to send emails to the person just sitting few steps away. While the face to face discussion might take few minutes to resolve the topic, they prefer to have up and down email communication occupying network bandwidth. This is a corporate style, spending half day to close the topic of half an hour worth.
2. Marking Boss in Emails – CC Culture
As email is the most preferred communication channel, by default people mark their bosses in emails. This is exclusively done to showcase the work even though there are no tangible outcomes from the email. The bitter truth is that the boss will encourage indirect communication to avoid facing problems directly. This so called CC culture can quickly make things dirtier when a boss marked in CC suddenly escalate.
3. Claiming Other’s Work
It is difficult to find who actually do the work in corporate companies. Mostly, external vendors do the actual work and internal employees used to showcase to take the credit out of it. This funny and dangerous habit of claiming other’s credibility makes the employees dumb in handling emergency situations. Check out the difference between a corporate manager and a skilled freelancer or an employee when you have a chance to meet them next time.
4. Alcohol and Smoking
Not long time ago people used to teach their kids – drinking and smoking are injurious to heath (it is also explicitly written on every single bottle / pack). In corporate culture, you can easily see people holding alcohol glass in any parties. Drunk and drive is also a common habit especially when employees hang over informally.
You can notice many small shops nearby the corporate companies. While alcohol drinking needs employees to go somewhere outside, it is very common habit for corporate employees to stand and smoke around the small shops during working hours. If drinking and smoking are not your choices, you may lose the network building opportunities ultimately affecting your professional career.
5. Meetings
One of the funny and useless thing happens throughout the day is meetings. Similar to emailing, formal meetings are held between the colleagues sitting in the same cubicle box. It is also very rare to see a meeting with predefined agenda. Generally, the discussion will go around multiple topics without proper moderation before postponing to later date. Mostly people will attend the meeting without knowing the expected result and chat on smartphones during the meeting.
6. Presentations
Creating PowerPoint presentations is one of the important qualifications required to become a corporate manager other than forwarding emails. Even at working level, the hard work of people will get sucked by few who prepare presentations and present to the management. Most of the companies do not rely on their own working employees and outsource these presentation works to management consulting companies. The charging of making presentation can be as high as 1000 USD per day while the increment to the internal employees is as less as 250 USD per year.
7. Political – Climbing the Ladder
The popular phrase used in corporate world is – climbing up in the ladder. This means you can do anything to get promotion in order to go to higher position. Below is a popular story about the attitude of corporate managers:
Two managers were walking through a forest and saw a hungry tiger. One of the guys start tightening his shoe laces and getting ready to run. The other asked, “Do you think you can run faster than the tiger?” The first manager replied, “I don’t need to run faster than the tiger; i just need to run faster than you!!!”
While talking on integrity and ethics people do everything with a political intention. The worthless topic may get highlighted just to project a person at the cost of impacting people doing hard work.
8. Decision Less and Blaming Culture
The decision making process is so poor in big corporate companies that each and every stuff needs multi-level approval. This unfortunately teaches blaming culture that people hardly accepts their mistakes and blame others for every delay. In IT companies, projects will be handled for years without any direction and pushed at the end only focusing on go live.
9. Performance Appraisal
While manager and employee meet each other throughout the year, they only will get 30 – 45 minutes in a year to discuss on feedback and performance improvements. The objective of the manager is to find fault and the objective of the employee is to showcase the positives to get more increment. These two objectives never match and the performance appraisal will be conducted for the name sake without much constructive feedback.
When things go wrong, ultimately it comes down to employees in terms of layoff, increased workload or reduced increment without much impact to managers.
10. Trainings
Corporate companies spend huge amount of money in training and development. These useless trainings are considered as leisure events and employees attend only to report in performance appraisal form. The surprising fact is that most of the company has attrition rate of 15 – 20%. It is evident that training is not the way to motivate leaving employees. Probably they are getting free training and moving on to other companies with that knowledge.
Conclusion
It does not mean no one should work in corporate companies. The point is you as an individual person should evaluate whether it is worth to work in such culture. People used to quote office is only a working place and their actual behavior will not be affected due to office culture. But the fact is that your habits, especially bad habits, will be with you wherever you are. Unknowingly, you will start procrastinate, blame others for your problems and trying to avoid facing real life problems. More than suit and necktie – a smiling face and caring mind is what needed in life. You can continue to work in corporate as long as you are confident of carrying these core values with you all time.
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