No Experience Gained, Just a Heap of Scheming — So What Actually Troubles Young People at Work? | QDaily Research Lab
The workplace horror stories on the market sound just plausible enough, and just scary enough, to be hard to see through — and they sell well. Why are they wrong?
The workplace horror stories on the market sound just plausible enough, and just scary enough, to be hard to see through — and they sell well. Why are they wrong?
In the accounts that circulate online, the workplace wears a downright ferocious face.
Count them yourself: brutal, cutthroat, swords drawn, undercurrents everywhere, plus that famous line, "there are no permanent friends and no permanent enemies, only permanent interests." Nearly every tense phrase used to describe a battlefield ends up applied to the office. In foreign TV shows, some people even keep a list of their office rivals, under a name scary enough to match: an office hit list.
As for how deep the water at work really runs, you are obviously not going to believe the Chinese TV dramas where going to work is basically a romance — "Throw a tantrum, snap at the boss twice, and he falls for you? Is the boss as brainless as you are? And anyway, can you flirt all day and never do any work?"
But the workplace horror stories above — the ones that sound just plausible enough, and just scary enough — are not so easy to see through, and they sell well: the high-traffic listicles, "10 Things Your Boss Loves to Hear," a whole genre of cynical guides to getting ahead; palace-intrigue workplace tips like "What to Watch Out for in State-Owned Enterprise Backstabbing"; the inspirational broth that says no matter how brutal things get, "if the heart holds on, so does the dream"; and the poisoned broth that says "the workplace doesn't believe in tears, and the truth about internships is that you fetch the takeout." Down the sweet broth, then down the poisoned broth, and going off the deep end starts to look like nothing to be afraid of.
They love teaching you scripts and flattery, and the scripts themselves are either clichés or nonsense:
For instance: everyone cares about face, so when you speak you must read the mood in the room and the other person's feelings; you have to study your boss's and your clients' expressions, and say "meanwhile" instead of "but" as often as you can.
There is also a self-contained system of nonsense, 10 secret moves for "handling" your boss: Step 1, respect your boss. Step 2, treat your boss like a client. Step 3, use your boss… None of it works, and it is slimy besides.
Calling the workplace a battlefield or a palace power struggle blows ordinary competition for resources out of all proportion. It manufactures a paranoid, every-step-a-landmine mood that gets you to buy vague, vulgar, poisoned lines like "there are no friends at work, and every time you trust someone you get burned," "the more your boss praises you in public, the less you actually get," and "ideals matter, but survival matters more than ideals."
Honestly, isn't this just the people who think experience has earned them the right to speak, scaring college students?
So what does the workplace actually look like? Drawing on a series of past QDaily Research Lab surveys about work and on related QDaily reporting, we have sorted out 11 workplace claims that sound right but aren't:
1. Your résumé has to sell you — put the same experience in fancier words and you'll stand out
In job-hunting season, when interview-prep guides are everywhere, "how to concoct an impressive résumé out of fancy vocabulary (one even you don't believe)" is a popular subject.
The truth is that whatever fancy phrasing you can come up with, HR has probably seen it until they are sick of it.
LinkedIn's list of the world's most overused résumé words of 2016, published last month, says that "specialized," "leadership" and "passionate" are the three words that show up most often in users' résumés. Big talk like "creative," "strategic" and "experienced" makes the list every year too. Apparently, every year's new arrivals in the job market — and everyone else who can't hack it where they are — congratulate themselves on doing exactly the same dumb thing.
2. Office clothes are a matter of dignity — you have to spend a fortune on a wardrobe before you can start work with an easy mind
Every job-hunting season, the WeChat accounts that got beaten to the workplace-advice beat have nothing left to teach you but interview outfits. What they don't tell you is that if you shop with some scheme to win by surprise, buying clothes you can't pull off or that have nothing to do with the job, you risk an aesthetic disaster, and a first impression among your new coworkers along the lines of "looks like he snuck out in his dad's suit."
Our surveys suggest that unless the company has a strict dress code, what matters most is getting the basics right — cleanliness first. In a QDaily Research Lab survey called "What kind of outfit is unacceptable at work?", more than a fifth of respondents said the thing they could least accept was not the wrong clothes but "body odor."
3. Unspoken rules are everywhere at work — to get a foothold you have to join a clique, and either scheme your way up or sleep your way up; in short, it's unspeakable
The office, supposedly, is full of shifty-eyed tattletales and naive young beauties personally promoted by the boss…
This sleazy misconception of the workplace mostly comes from office novels and TV dramas.
What we found is that the unwritten rules young people actually run into are more likely to be the conventions nobody teaches you but that are genuinely hard to get right, such as:
"How do you address a coworker more senior than you? By name, or as 'brother,' 'sister,' 'teacher'?"
"Which is ruder, discussing work over WeChat or just calling whenever something comes up?"
"If you really can't tell someone's gender from their name, how are you supposed to address them?"
"Is copying the whole project team on every related email an intrusion or necessary teamwork?"
4. When your boss chews you out it's for your own good — if you can't take that much pressure, you're immature
This line is fairly old, from our parents' era, when trust and affection were shown through a harsh scolding. These days, being mature does not mean taking abuse gladly:
In QDaily Research Lab's "Test Your Love-Your-Job Index", which drew 12,487 responses, 78% of people said they cared a lot about praise from their direct manager. A report from the HR firm ManpowerGroup says much the same: beyond money, young people need to be recognized and affirmed. Half of young people worldwide have left a job because they felt unappreciated; in China the figure is 36%. Even grown-ups who earn their own living need to be told they did well.
5. Office politics is just backstabbing, and if you stay out of it you'll be frozen out
People hold different positions, with different stances and needs, and office politics is really a tool for coordinating among them. It is neutral in itself. Some people do choose to stir up trouble or flatter their way up, but that is not all office politics is.
We found that the office politics people run into more often looks like this: raises and promotions depend not only on performance but on actively asking your boss for them; there is a subtle pecking order between departments, and asking another department for help can get you passed around; agreements usually have to be put in writing rather than left as verbal promises; and you have to keep an appropriate distance from coworkers and superiors alike.
The office should not turn you into a jaded old hand. Ideally, work teaches you hard skills, raises your professionalism, teaches you to protect your own lawful and reasonable interests, and levels up your emotional intelligence along the way.
6. Flatter your boss, claim the credit, work the angles, and you've mastered the essence of workplace emotional intelligence
The scripts for flattering your boss have less to do with emotional intelligence than with what you might call the slickness quotient — your office slipperiness rating.
So what do people actually recognize as "high emotional intelligence" at work?
Do your own job well and don't meddle in what isn't yours;
take the work seriously, be accountable and responsible, don't grumble or spread bad feeling, and get along with coworkers as equals.
7. SOHO is so cool — make money without leaving the house, awesome!
Rosy fantasies about work come in a fixed genre: the tour of "jobs everyone wants." In those stories you meet the SOHO crowd who never commute, or the professional hotel testers whose main job is sleeping in beds.
What the stories rarely give you is the truth about these dream jobs. We usually see only the ease of skipping the commute and the early alarm, and never expect that working at home also means the whole day is working hours; that with nobody to talk to you get lonely enough to chat with the bird on the windowsill; that with no exercise and no will to move, SOHO tends to end up as SOBO (small office, bed office), working from bed, with an aching back and nothing awesome about it — in fact a bit awful.
A study published in a journal of the American Psychological Association found that working from home two days a week does the most for job satisfaction; past two days, the effect is not nearly as pronounced.
8. Cross-industry, multi-skilled "slash youth" are in demand at work
The idea of slash youth comes from the English word "slash," by way of a 2007 book by New York Times columnist Marci Alboher, One Person/Multiple Careers, about people who hold several professional identities and separate them with slashes.
But plenty of young people in China have turned it into a self-indulgent pile-up of hobby tags — something like "Er Gou: champion slacker at a public institution/designer manqué/daydreamer/crayfish-peeling contest winner/serial food offender…"
The workplace, though, still mainly values professional skill. Skills that connect to and reinforce one another are worth something; unrelated hobbies, however prettily dressed up, should not naively be expected to win an employer over.
The 10,000 hours it takes to get genuinely good at a skill are still necessary. A ManpowerGroup survey found that 80% of young people in China agree that continuing to improve their work skills is the key to their own future careers.
9. Employers are so humane now — look, some even give slacking-off leave, paternity leave, period leave
Stories like these are usually career media or WeChat accounts at the end of their rope, importing enviable perks from companies abroad. Honestly, rather than discussing someone else's benefits, just tell me how to take my annual leave.
In a QDaily Research Lab survey called "Why didn't you use up last year's annual leave?", of 1,648 respondents, 20.4% said it was because nobody could take over their work while they were away, and 6.5% felt too pressed for time, worried that taking the leave would blow their KPIs — the work that never gets finished is always there, while the leave you never take simply expires, which is dispiriting. Another 13.0% couldn't ask for leave with a clear conscience, afraid their boss would wonder, "Don't you have anything to do these days?"
10. Some industries eat the young — staying up and working late every day, your odds of dying from overwork are huge
Young people really are pushing hard. Compared with several generations before them, people aged 20 to 34 today work unprecedented hours. ManpowerGroup's global survey found that 84% of respondents work more than 40 hours a week and 30% work more than 50 hours a week, the equivalent of 10 unbroken hours a day on workdays. And ever since everyone got used to working over WeChat, you often have to be on standby 24 hours a day. It's rough.
Beyond real busyness, though, two other things are going on: reporting a job that takes minutes as one that took hours, and stretching a job that takes minutes until it really does take hours.
The less people want to work, the more ritual they need. Procrastinating before you start becomes a necessary period of emotional preparation; you make a show of waiting for the top of the hour; and you end up in the slacking loop — "I can only stop goofing off and start working on the hour, but I always overshoot by a minute or two, so I have to wait for the next one" — which never ends.
One designer once charted her own working day as a complaint: from eight in the morning to eight at night she did nothing, then at three a.m. turned into Van Gogh. She wasn't staying up late on purpose; 70% of her time had gone to binge-watching shows.
11. Your job is about to be taken by robots — get out of a sunset industry or die with it
Every so often, research institutes publish warnings that "robots will replace human labor," the media put a sensational headline on them, and the same argument flares up year after year.
Technology destroys some existing jobs, but it also brings new ones into being. Don't be scared!
As about a third of most adults' lives, the daily grind of work is nowhere near as hellish as the cynical horror stories say. Besides, according to a report by Nikkei, most young Chinese people today work more to "get rich" than to cover basic survival, so there is no need to grit your teeth through an environment you can't adapt to. How big a deal is changing jobs?
And that is what people do. LinkedIn's 2014 Report on Job-Hopping Among Chinese Professionals found that Chinese professionals are ever more footloose: even measured against Americans, who look relaxed and cheerful, never mind the famously overworked Japanese, they are far more restless. Comparing average time in a job across the two countries, Chinese professionals stick with the same position for only 34 months. Americans stay in the same position for 56.
Work isn't that miserable, but it isn't exactly easy either. We found that the real troubles young people meet at work tend to come from five directions:
1. Benefits traps in job hunting
For people new to work, figuring out how much comes out of your pay for the five social insurances and one housing fund can be a deeper arithmetic black hole than the discount rules of Double 11. In a Research Lab survey called "Once you started the job, how was it different from what you expected?", the top answer was "after the five insurances and one housing fund come out, that's all that's left of the salary on the offer." A job posting that promises "industry-competitive compensation" often turns into compensation that makes you wonder whether the whole industry is in decline.
Other benefits policies are just as puzzling, especially at startups skilled in seduction, whose job postings all need a second round of translation. "Fully flexible hours, work on your conscience" means "flexible enough that we can't promise you won't work at three in the morning, and if you don't work at three in the morning you have no conscience." "Stock options offered" means "don't complain about the low pay, because we're going public — the short-sighted may leave, no hard feelings." If they claim to offer an "annual company trip," judge by the size of the company: at an angel-round startup that may mean a trip to Tieling, so don't get your hopes up. And if you see a company gleefully write "we have an office cat" into its posting, you can generally conclude that it is not only tiny but truly, truly has no other benefits worth the name.
2. Onboarding training that never treats the actual complaint
When you join a new employer, what you urgently need to know is probably how expense reimbursement works, where the good-value lunch sets are, which side is Party A and which is Party B, the details of the pecking order between departments, and what time everyone actually agrees is quitting time. None of it appears in the boss's warm, hypnotic welcome speech. The result: too embarrassed to ask how to print or photocopy, you send your draft to the printer in the boss's office; signing a contract with a client, you cheerfully put your own name in the Party A column… and your coworkers rib you about it for a year.
3. The guiltier you feel, the fancier your fake busyness
A QDaily Research Lab survey of 6,193 people found that a lot of people feel shaky about their own competence at work: 15% think their ability doesn't match their degree, and 14.3% are too timid to ever say what they think out loud. The main way people handle that feeling is to feel they always need to look busy.
In another survey, "What's the most useful skill you've found at work?", besides the general principle "don't talk tough, don't act soft," people picked out specific techniques for fake busyness: reporting a job that takes minutes as one that took hours; writing up the utterly unremarkable as a hundred flowers in bloom; mastering ways to show off your overtime without appearing to. Meanwhile the skills that actually bear on the work — public speaking without stammering, making data charts, dealing with strangers — stay stuck at the "I'd really like to learn that" stage.
4. The anxiety of "the young are to be feared"
In the survey "What do you think the people younger than you at work are like?", people's judgments of the new generation were mostly positive: worldly, quick-witted, capable. The reader @LiaoJieyunJoanna spelled out her worry: "They're smart and hardworking, with a strong drive to learn on their own. In the internet age information is so easy to get that a little effort makes you well-informed and broad-minded, and they know what they want better than we did back then. Sometimes I really feel there's not much distance between a young person two or three years out of school and me with ten years of work behind me, and my own value at work feels precarious."
5. Overtime in disguise, and bad rest, which is the most maddening of all
QDaily Research Lab once ran a survey called "Test Your Love-Your-Job Index?", which collected 10,498 responses. On this set of questions, out of a possible 8 points, men generally predicted they would score 4.55 and actually averaged 3.75; women generally predicted 4.51 and actually averaged 3.51. The higher the score, the more you love your job — on average, people's attitude to work leans closer to "going to work is like visiting a grave."
Nothing stings more than not getting the rest you are owed: 82% of people were strongly angered by "still having to work while on annual leave"; and faced with an emergency like "it's already 8 p.m. and you have two more hours of overtime," fewer than a third were willing.
The workplace pleasantry young people hate most is the disguised nudge to work overtime — hearing at 5:30 p.m. that "no rush, just get me the report today" makes them want to detonate on the spot;
The facility young people most want near the office is "a nap shop with Wi-Fi where a monthly pass buys you two hours of sleep a day";
Young people's biggest complaint about their current jobs is "why does nobody dare leave first when six o'clock comes," — an employer's real quitting time is to its official quitting time what the customer's photo is to the catalogue shot.
Work can of course be treacherous, but office dramas too far removed from reality tend to magnify and distort conflict at work, and following all manner of sly workplace cynicism gets you no further than the vulgar fantasy of "office rookie turns elite overnight."
In fact, most of the time, what people at work worry about are small, real troubles. The true face of the workplace we have observed above turns out to look a lot like life itself — there is hardship, but not as much as the legends claim.
On the whole, the workplace is not some extremely dangerous place. We hope that sorting out the truths above helps ease the anxiety of people just starting out.
Yes, don't be too anxious.
Although — isn't the deadline on your desk coming up again?
Cover image and illustrations by: Lin Xiaoyao
QDaily Research Lab is a survey column at QDaily, an interactive platform for discussing all sorts of lifestyle questions. It may be about shifts and trends in how people live, or about a particular brand's service. Here you can vote, vent, and say where you stand.
Translated from the original QDaily article. Original publication date retained.