Tuesday, November 18, 2014

Surviving Chinaman Company

Okay, you probably know or not sure what is the term Chinaman referring to. Rather than defining what is a Chinaman company in definition or statement method, the list below is the practice of a common Chinaman company.
  • You are paid with minimal salary compare to market price
  • Your company expect you to work all the time and whenever possible, including at night, lunch time, weekend, and holiday, regardless of your official working time. Best of all, no OT claim for that.
  • Your company has high turn over rate. Constantly recruiting people and people usually don't stay too long
  • It's quite difficult to advance into higher position because the senior will remain for a long time
  • Always stressful and getting angry is normal.
  • Usually the higher position people is the family member or releative of the boss
  • Applying for leave is harder than rushing project with a deadline. You might feel its really hard to ask for a leave.
  • Start work exactly on your actual starting work hour and get off exactly on your actual finishing work hour give a huge bad impression to your boss
  • You will be asked to settle all sort of work that has no relation in the company or your job scope, it's just related to the boss personal thing
  • If you got late 1 or 2 minutes, that's bad employee that has no self discipline and lack of responsibility; if you work extra hours after working hour won't be consider hardworking & good employee
  • They are very strict on the company benefits and usually very stingy in every possible situation
  • You eventually be asked to do work from higher position but your job title remain the same, as well as your salary
  • Your job scope eventually involve the work task of many departments, and then to all departments
  • High office politics and you felt like you are fighting in war sometimes, with the people in your company
  • Standard performance appraisal might be used but in the end, it's all goes back to your boss and manager sense of judgement

A so-call chinaman company might no cover all the traits above. No doubt any company out there might intentionally or unintentionally practice on any of the bad practice listed above, but if a company got more than half of the traits above, it's definitely a chinaman company, even if the boss is not from China or is a Chinese. The term is referring more to the mindset rather than practice anyway.

I have seen many good example of people working under chinaman company, also heard lots of complain, dissatisfaction, and grudge according to their experience and what they see & face daily. In the end, it's all comes up to one thing: They are getting really unhappy about their work, and it's directly making their personal life tough because they are not happy at all. Furthermore, what they earn in the end is minimal. Many people work for money, but if you can get find a better company, you can earn more money when the company is not so stingy and you might get more extra benefits.

Understanding this, a lot of people that I know only stay a short while with the chinaman company and they definitely won't consider any good memory when leaving the company. But still, many people choose to continue staying with the chinaman company despite how much complain and dissatisfaction they had. The common reasons I heard are these:
  • It's not easy to get another job in this field (Usually apply to business-related job)
  • It would be ugly/ashamed for unable to work too long in one company
  • I'm a fresh graduate, so I should not make any complaint and do what other people ask me to do
  • Work should be just like this, it's all about things that we dislike
  • It's my destiny since I chosen this company
Although I'm strongly disagree on all the given reasons above (especially the last one), and I consider the common reasons that I heard to continue staying in a chinaman company is not considerable and reasonable at all, i would not say that the reasons are not true at all.

No matter what you reason to continue staying in a chinaman company is, one thing you need to notice is that many people will continue stay in chinaman company. After looking at the bad part of chinaman company, we will have to look at the bright side as well. Those who work under the chinaman company will usually go through these type of unseen benefits:
  1. You are knowledgeable in many different things and capable of doing wide range of work task
  2. Your stress tolerance are higher than ordinary level
  3. You are more willing to involve yourself to work
  4. You feel more confident because you constantly dealing with challenges
  5. You feel that you have higher value for working under such difficult environment
  6. You develop better skill to handle work task from higher position
  7. You are more used to office politics and know how to protect your own rights & benefits
  8. You may find future jobs a lot easier
Learning the benefits does not tell you that working under a chinaman company is a good idea, of course. In the end of the day, it's your choice to stick with them or not. If we consider deeper, keep on changing to another company and hope that it won't be another chinaman company, and then change again when you found out that IT IS a chinaman company won't get you anywhere too. Rather that, we want to look into the actual practice and things to do when we work, or specifically, "survive" in the chinaman company.

Cautious: Surviving Guideline Start Here....

Don't expect any relaxing or fun moment, seriously. Chinaman company environment is all about rushing work, rushing work, more work, more stress, more bad things and bad things. Working there won't give you much joy and good memory BUT, despite how much you want to hate your job and how much everyone people hate the job there, they are still human being that want to enjoy their life and prefer a good working experience rather than the opposite. Therefore, it's crucial to meet people who are fun to work with and able to chat along.

All time working can be really frustrated and you probably won't have much time to chat even if you get to know good people (except when boss is not around). But hey, life is not all about work, you still need to learn to be happy despite working in an environment that don't really expect you to enjoy working here. So getting to know people who can add some nice moment into your daily working moment can add more joy to you, no matter how busy or difficult your work can be.

But becareful, due to the high possibility of political practice, you need to know who is alright to joke with, who couldn't keep things as secret, and the spy that might be hidden among the first line. Being careful with people is essential, just that you need to learn to meet people and bring joy moment into your working life as well as others working life, but at the same time learn to say what you can say and what you can't. So, trust people with a limit.

When you meet people who can share secret and worries, go ahead and treat them as a friend, you don’t need to be cautious of everyone and keep everything in yourself. In another way round, if you found out there are people who talk bad about you and can’t be trusted, beware of that person but you don’t need to talk bad or wish that he/she will have bad days.

Not to forget to take really good care of yourself because your working time is over, too over, and over-abused. Your boss might make you stay knowing that it's lunch time and after office hour, unless they are also very hungry or they are rushing home.

No matter what sort of reasons they want you to stay and do the work, don't try your best finish up everything then only go for your meal. Food is the essential need for us. We can be starved once in awhile, but you are torturing your stomach and exposing to disease and illness that could be incurable when you practice this often (This is no joke because it happen too many time but usually work won’t get blame, the person will).

Trying to finish up the work before going for your meal is totally bad idea. No matter how you finish up, you are finishing up a portion of the work, but more of them are on the way. You see, the company is considered a chinaman company for a reason.

You can't really finish up the work. Things got worse when you suddenly asked to do urgent work before you manage to complete your desire portion. So go and take some food as soon as you have the time. Or, practice a good habit of filling up your desk with dry food like bread and biscuit, whenever you have space for it. Usually you will be super busy so don't worry about the food causing you unable to concentrate on work.

Other than taking good care of your physical health, which is taking food and water whenever you need it, and take plenty of rest when you have the right time and space, taking care of your mental health can be a great challenge and it won't be easy.

As stated above and as experienced by yourself, your working environment can be extremely stressful and it's not only you, the stress and pressure is pass around all over the place and can hit anyone easily. That's when you not only need to deal with your work load stress, you also need to deal with the black face and frustrating people as if you are the one that offending them.

Well, I wouldn't agree that showing your frustration and negative emotion to others when you are under stress and feeling pressured is fine, because other people are innocent even if they are not behaving in the right way, and personal feeling absolutely won't make your work easier.

Not to mention it's a lot easier to bring up argument that involve more personal feeling instead of trying to settle work issues. In the end of the day, such event causing the work harder to be done when the involving individuals had hard feeling towards each other, and they feel really unhappy when they meet the same person, or maybe deal with him/her again.

This is why, training yourself to put aside personal feeling is a great challenge but it’s really beneficial to you when you are able to put your personal feeling aside and focus on how to seek solution based on actual work problem, you tend to solve more issues and at a certain point, you can learn to look through many unnecessary feeling that only exist to make your days and work life bad.

Understanding that putting personal feeling in the work is a big bad idea, we still need to know that sometimes it’s unavoidable because we are human. We can’t live with dull feeling and doesn’t care anything at all. So I would say putting personal feeling to a certain extend is fine. However, it’s still important that we learn to take care of our feeling and mental health, instead of repeat practicing putting it aside.

If we keep on putting feeling aside, we doesn’t really put it down but accumulating in us, and risk exploding our emotion sooner or later. So training yourself to get away with work is essential, especially if you find it hard to stay away from work when you are tied with too much of tasks.

Taking leave is one of the challenges because as mentioned earlier, you might experience trying to ask for a leave but got rejected in an unreasonable manner, or the management just refuses to approve your leave without a solid reason. You need to bear in mind one thing: Massive amount of work is not a solid reason to unapproved your leave.

If you work as a management level, you might disagree on this because you need to ensure that the work and tasks are done on time and everything is aligned with the timeline. Unfortunately, human are not robot and they are not exist to rush work.

I have a friend who confront his boss and remind the boss of all the hard and tough work he had gone through for many many months and got his leave rejected many times. In the end, the boss allows him to have one day leave, only. When we keep on going, your boss, manager or supervisor probably forgotten that you have the right to take leave. This is why it is important to educate them that you need to take leave and you have the rights for that.

You might concern that if you take leave often, or you want to take leave when you know that they don’t really like it, you can get a bad impression or marked as bad performance employee but seriously, why the hell you want to care about such inaccurate performance measurement that doesn’t follow any standard but just mere feeling? Remember this, no matter how unhappy your management people could be, the problem lies within themselves and they need to learn that you are practicing your rights and responsibility.

Plan and ask for leave, request the solid reason if they reject you, ask them to provide you the right date to take your leave, and get your leave form approved. Don’t believe in verbalize leave because your management people will easily forget it or change their mind later by delaying your leave, and you got trapped into the same cycle again.

Due to the extreme challenges and workload that you need to handle every day, working life will become something that totally consume all your life as long as you keep on working and working. When you are too into it, you might found out that sometimes when you are alone and you got nobody to talk to, you just think about work. That’s a sign that you are putting your own life into it and you definitely don’t happy about it.

At such time, you need to identify one crucial thing that you probably forgotten for a long time: your personal life. No matter how much we want to spend time for other stuff, we are still human being that wish that the best and important belongs to our life. But the things is valueable things don’t come to us, we are to make effort to achieve them.

Chinaman company don’t really cater for the value of your personal life and from the surface, they doesn’t really care how happy you are as an individual. So as an adult, you are suppose to care for how great you feel on a daily basis and how to make your life more enjoyable, rather than submitting yourself to all the stress and workload that make your life terrible.

From now on, stop telling yourself that finishing work is the main priority and that’s the main goal to make you a good employee. Work smart while enjoying life is the trend that define a positive and efficient employee. Working in a chinaman company can make life really tough to enjoy but remember, working in a tough environment definitely make you stronger as long as you learn the right thing and train yourself to know what is the right behavior and mindset, instead of letting chinaman company complete ruin yourself.
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2 comments:

  1. Thank you very much for this write up. It signify a kind of trend in a chinaman company which most items were right at a point.

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    1. Hello, thanks for the comment. Indeed, this trend has been going on for a long time and I don't see much changes ever since I published this post. Although I don't keep track of the trend of chinaman company too much nowadays. But yeah, the trend of chinaman and other type such as western style company is there.

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