Working for a corporate is always difficult. You are underappreciated and replaceable whether you outperformed or underperformed. If you ever outperformed in your task, you unintentionally manifest prejudice and abhor against everything you do or didn’t do. Appeasing those who are viciously biased against you, won’t work either. Personally, I got this all the time, the elements of cronyism and nepotism in dealing with employees like me are somewhat inequitable, moreover, employees are often judged based on who do you know and how close you are to the individual who has the potential political influence in the office. Notwithstanding every effort of your attempts for improvement spontaneously nullified.
It is always the employees’ fault regardless of every mistake committed by the company itself. Throughout my career, never had I ever heard people in the high position apologising to employees for their mistakes, it was always the employees who were the ones apologising for the mistake they don’t commit. In my experience of working in a company (I can’t disclose the name here) in Penang Island was the most depressing and risible.
Frequently I got excommunicated whenever questions were raised which later magically became an accusation of me being not communicative enough. In other words, I had got appraisal feedback which suggested I should be communicating more. Ironically, it is easy to gesticulate at someone than address the obvious scarcity that you just accused about. Consequently, in my understanding, communication is bilateral and precisely delivers a message across. Thus, In my numerous attempt of communicating the way they wanted, latterly I figured that in the communication the management was to speak in a more “Chinese-Like” way. I grew up speaking English and other languages, and it is a common trend or tradition in Malaysia whereas Chinese Educated individuals have a wave of massive anger and abhorrence preinstalled. I got called names like “English-Arse-liker”, “Suck-Banana”, and much more to list here but will be inappropriate. It saddens me each time I see people defending this tradition but justifying it with the saying “We need to speak more Chinese-like to get customers”, “We hire only Chinese because Our customers are Chinese”. I don’t have any stance against if a company would want to recruit only Chinese for the reason most of their customer are Chinese, thus here is where I draw the line, there are distinctions between racially biased and providing better customer services.
I consistently have to encounter workplace politics such as Chinese are mainly in a group gossiping and fabricating the truth of any events. Most of the time, predictably they excommunicate me for the constant reason that I wasn’t Chinese enough. (What am I supposed to do to look more Chinese? Fanning myself with a paper fan?) I am not speaking of all of the Chinese race are as such, but I am specifically addressing these fractions of illiterate Chinese who are making life a living nightmare for the others, just because they thought they have a higher position in a company. Nevertheless, each of us is human with no power, status outside of the workplace, unfortunately, some people don’t understand that.