Posted on 07/15/2014 2:13:15 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
This Robust article is Giving 110% and Taken It To The Next Level
The Best Practice is to Leverage the employees Best Practices and Empower them while they look for that next job.
You can be forced to do just about anything, whether you're qualified to do it or not.
12. "Rotating on-call."
We own your a$$ 24x7x365. And when you're "off the clock," you still have to behave as if you weren't.
13. "Matrixed organization."
You'll have a dozen bosses, none of whom have a clue about what you do. But they'll all tell you what to do.
When I won my little war, it was easy to tell he was a sore loser. In his mind, the lowly and uncool serfs were for his beckoned call and were to never be uppity.
I also figured there was a knife or two being sharpened with my name on it by others in management. I was offered a job a couple months later and I took it. Most of the normals were kind of bummed at me leaving. A few months later, I heard from one of my friends that asked me if I was interested in coming back. I bet it killed some of the management to even consider it. I didn’t go back.
My only goal was to get a long overdue promotion. Nothing else. What ended up was all the ones in my grade (12 maybe) were promoted to the next grade. All well and good.
Some definitely deserved an upgrade and suffered longer than me. I guess it was a mass patch to keep the serfs from getting ideas that a higher being wasn’t so high and invulnerable after all.
I had a wannabe boss and the token super above him that became such control freaks. It was normal to be asked what I had for breakfast, what TV shows did I watch, where did I go on weekends, and endless variations. I told them nothing as a rule or would make up something outrageous.
How many people can ruin your life in one day?
In being an employee you are exposing yourself to a single point failure with significant negative consequences.
Corpocracy is not for me. I’ll take my chances on my own.
The lies socialists say:
1) You have had a long journey. Your are dirty. Please, step into the showers...
Lies 2 to 100,000 all lead to number 1.
All true
1. We can’t pay you more.
This may be true. You can be paid what the market will bear and probably no more. If you are exceptional you probably can’t be paid what you are worth.
2. Your raise is above average.
Probably a lie
3. We’re one big happy family
On par with be happy in your work. Forget it. It’s business.
4. There’s no truth in the layoff rumor.
Biggest lie here. Where there is smoke there is fire. If you hear it and feel it it is true. Plan on it and plan on it hitting you.
5. My hands are tied.
Sometimes but usually a cop out. The truth would be better.
6. You’ll be working forty hours a week.
If you’re salaried you’ll probably never work 40 hours per week and figure on the balance of overtime being against you. Eventually you may be paid for your knowledge and not the time you put in but probably not unless you become so valuable you can invoke this. Probably never.
7. Your response will be confidential.
When two know a secret it isn’t a secret anymore.
8. Your participation is voluntary.
But not participating will eventually be held against you. Probably when it matters the most.
Just recieved a two day “suspension” written up for one thing that I did do, and another I didn’t, but, the REAL reason was because of recent incidences where I would not be dishonest with a customer. So I quit.
“Constructive Firing” I will just go on to the next shop.
I am a mechanic and I will not perform an un-needed repair nor will I blindly accept another techs diag without verifying the problem because the real problem then becomes yours. Worse shop I ever worked in.
One night I had just managed to get my son to start on his homework and the phone rang. It was work, and they were asking me a stupid question that any first-year tech support could have answered. I blew up and told them to do their homework, call the right person, and leave me alone.
A week later, I was fired.
When I told the director that I was not "on the clock," his response -- and I am not making this up -- was "If we call you at 3 in the morning on Christmas, you are required to answer."
I moved, found another job, and am now making more than 3 times what I was making there. That place was a discount hell-hole. And I heard every one of the lines in this article there at one point or another.
Glad you were able to move up and out. My worst experience was with a electronics recycling and reselling company. They employed a personnel strategy that WWI generals would appreciate.
Hire lots of cheap temps, work them to the point they would quit or do something to get fired, and replace. I was one of the few full timers. I was never a temp, I filled out an application and was hired. I was supposed to be the head of refurb and repair and get a cut of the Ebay sales.
The head yo yo came from St. Louis and told me point blank in the presence of witnesses that he set me up to fail. It was a 3 man job. I got one person off and on. Also he told me to push capacitors in and mark them fixed.
His boss was even more bizarre. One time he IM’d me about a large flat screen TV to list and sell. It was in Kansas City and I was in SC. He chewed me out saying I was incompetent and the like for daring to contradict with facts. I even got the person out there to chime in and swear it was in KC but to no avail. I gave up.
The others made him look fairly tame.
I quit once but came back to finally do what I was supposed to do all along. That lasted a couple of months. I wound up quitting again. I went the contractor route. It was feast and famine but generally a better life. 99% of the time I was treated really well.
All that contracting finally led to a full time job at a manufacturing place out in the woods. After 5 months as a contractor, I was hired. My starting salary was a little over 50K and I am more or less 3rd in command. All I have is my A+ and 6 class crash course on PC repair 14 years ago. My Microsoft certs died a long time ago. No one seemed to care when I had them.
Dilbert explains all about corporate life.
http://news.yahoo.com/photos/dilbert-slideshow/20140715-dt140715-gif-photo-050437299.html
And he is dead accurate too.
At the last place I worked, I heard seven out of the eight.
The only one I didn’t hear was number six, because they cut my hours.
Before I opened my own business I worked at a place where the boss lied all the time.
I do hobby electronics and this was the early 80’s. I whipped up a buzzer box with a light on it with a remote control. I told everybody it was a voice stress detector and kept it around all the time.
Every time I heard BS I’d hit the button. I’d set it on the table for meetings. After a while the boss pulled his head out.
I finally got fired for no real reason. Funny his computer system never worked again after I left. Oh he was a liberal too and I kept Rush on the radio.
She has since been demoted and is no longer in charge of people.
I had a bitch hag boss in my first real IT job after escaping public TV land. I could do no right no matter what others would say when they came through. Even the director who was a decent enough chap didn’t even want to look me in the eye after a year and change.
There were days crossing the parking lot I hoped to be hit by a car or have a heart attack, anything not to have to go there. My spouse was so paranoid about not having health insurance I went in and toughed it.
I was so glad to turn in my notice. It was such a relief.
She probably screwed me on several jobs I applied for since it took a while to get someone else in charge around there as a reference.
I heard about a year ago from someone still there that she left and got a job at TD bank. If she works where I think she does, it is fitting. Plenty of iron bars and stone walls.
I also heard she got divorced (again)and I hope it keeps her tied up in court and spending all her money for years. I met the hubby a couple of times. I wasn’t impressed at all.
Put an extra foot of height on, bad dental work, more hair, a loud moomoo, and some breasts and you have the hag I dealt with.
If a company has any cash flow whatsoever, the boss is making decisions about where to spend based on what the boss feels is a priority. Your salary isn’t the priority, so can’t really means won’t.
First of all the author of this article is a complete moron. A positive cash flow does not necessarily equate to profitability. A company could have a positive cash flow but also carry heavy debt and or carry large liabilities on their books.
I am reminded of the job I held many years ago as the “finance director” (read – full charge super bookkeeper - the payroll, AP, AR general accountant, HR person) for a small family owned private social work and home health care company. The husband of the owner was my boss and he had no finance or accounting background whatsoever and his wife, the owner was even more clueless and for years this company’s books were a real mess – they didn’t even know what was actually in their business checking account at any time live alone whether they were making a profit or not and that the previous “bookkeeper” had been embezzling and they didn’t even know it, were completely clueless until I found it. After many, many long hours, many late nights, I finally whipped things into shape and started providing them with monthly P&L and Balance Sheet statements along with reconciled bank statements and a weekly and monthly projected cash flow analysis. I remember my “boss” Mel (who was a really sweet guy but not all that financially savvy), after several months of providing these financial statements, started questioning me how it was possible that the P&L statement had been showing a loss when the bank statement showed a positive balance. He questioned that my financial statements couldn’t be right since their checking account still had a positive balance (Headbang!). I had to sit down with him and for many hours over the course of several days tried to explain the basics of accounting, of accrual accounting, of carrying liabilities on the books, how to read a P&L, etc. He still had trouble conceiving that just because they had a positive check book balance – a positive “cash flow”, how they were still losing money. It wasn’t until he and his wife brought in a new outside accountant from a well respected CPA firm, who reiterated exactly what I had told them and commended me for doing such a good job. Did I get a raise? No. LOL!
So is the author of this article much like my old boss Me? Is he really suggesting that a company should put every dime they have in terms of any positive cash flow at any given moment (or even all their profits in any given year) into doling out raises?
And FWIW, any business that does this will not be in business very long. For a business to survive (and continue to employ you) and hopefully grow and expand, giving you opportunities for advancement and create job opportunities for others, they have to do things like build up reserves for times when their sales or profits go down or when they have to invest their capital in improvements such as new equipment or R&D or to expand their market reach, etc. Those also cost money. Salary increases are not the only thing a company has to spend.
Since your compensation always reflects the minimum your boss believes you’ll accept, when you hear this lie, it’s a signal that you need to renegotiate the compensation agreement you have with your boss.
Again – BS! If the company you are working for only is paying you the minimum they “believe” you are willing to accept; 1) you are a moron for accepting it if in the job market you are actually worth more and 2) they will not retain good workers and will eventually lose them to competitors, spending more in hiring and training costs in high turnover rates than they save by low balling on wages. And I would argue that it is a fallacy that your compensation “always” the minimum. The idiot who wrote this article doesn’t have a clue and IMO, is probably way over compensated. I would also mention that there are other things other than just your hourly wage or salary that factors into your overall compensation package.
Let’s say that the health insurance premiums your company pays goes up by 10% but the company decides to only increase your payroll deduction by 5%, absorbing the other 5% by what the company pays. Guess what? You just got a 5% increase even though your gross and take home pay didn’t change. Many employees only look at their weekly paystub and forget to factor in company paid benefits as being part of their total compensation.
2. “Your raise is above average.”
If you’re in an organization in which the compensation for everyone in the group is pulled from a set amount of money, there’s a good chance that the boss is describing almost everyone’s raise as “above average.”
What I think he “might” be talking about here is an employee evaluation system commonly referred to as the “vitality curve” (or forced ranking, forced distribution, rank and yank, quota-based differentiation, and stack ranking) made famous or infamous by Jack Welch at GE.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitality_curve
This was popular for a time in many big corporations (GE, Enron, Microsoft and others) but it has very much fallen out of favor. Microsoft and many other have recently abandoned it. Some companies use a rather modified form of it like the one I work for. But at the end of the day, when it comes to annual raises (if the company you work for even decides to grant annual performance or COLA raises at all – and I’ve worked for quite a few that don’t – they only give raises out based on longevity or commensurate with an actual job promotion or a measurable metrics like production or sales goals or a measurable increase in skills), the company most like (if they are smart and manage their finances well) has an overall annual budget for salary increases. That means if there are a high number of high performers who merit raises, that piece of the pie gets sliced among them all so your share will be smaller.
Companies that employ nonunion labor are exquisitely sensitive about anybody sharing salary information, because such sharing inevitably makes somebody feel that he or she is being slighted.
Bosses therefore tell this lie because they’re afraid that if you knew what your coworkers were being paid, you would quit in disgust.
Oh. I see. Only companies that employ “non-union” labor are at fault? Only non-union companies lie to their employees? The Unions don’t lie as well. Gee. I’m seeing some real “pro labor union” bias here in this piece and am surprised no one else has picked up on it.
There are many very good reasons why you don’t want to discuss with your co-workers what you make. For one thing, you might actually be worth more than one of your slacker, marginally performing co-workers who just happens to have the same job title as you. Do you also tell your co-workers how much your monthly mortgage payment is?
And what if while discussing with your co-workers how much you make, rather than finding out you are being paid less (and quitting in disgust), you and your co-workers find out that you are making more? What then? Are you supposed to go to your boss and demand that everyone you shared how much you are making; should they get a raise so and just because they should make the same as you, or are you going to volunteer to take a pay cut to make everything “more equal”?
I could go on and on, there are so many other things completely wrong, factually incorrect and misleading in this article. It sounds like it was written by someone who spent last summer camped out at OWS rallies.
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