Caring On the Job is Unprofessional??

Do you ever wonder what happened to the days when an employer actually cared about its employees? The days when an employer knew his/her employees by name. Have you noticed that anymore you are just a number. Just one of the crowd of nameless souls meandering around trying to make a living.
What about the days when your employer was sympathetic when you lost a loved one, and I mean they meant it when they said they were sorry, take as long as you need. Now if you loose an immediate( this doesn't include aunts, uncles, cousins...) member of the family you get 3 days off paid, after that you better suck it up and get back to work or it is unexcused and can lead to you getting fired. I wonder who came up with that number...Hmmm..3 days if plenty of time to grieve...
What happened to the days when you got up and were sick and called your boss and they told you to get well, get some rest..we will be thinking about you. Now, you call in and you better have a doctors excuse, and even then you are getting called and asked when you are coming back because your absence is making it hard on everyone else...

What has happened to human compassion?

What happened to the days when you went to work and busted your rear end and were rewarded for it. You moved up in the company because you earned that right, not because you were kin to the boss or because you were the office snitch and/or "suck-up".

We were given a speech at work the other day that we were "catering to the wrong clients". I got in trouble for speaking up and saying "but isn't a client a client, didn't they all sign up under the same guidelines". It upset me and I expressed that, only to get called into the office for a closed door reprimand. How is it good customer service to treat some clients better than others? Why is all that I wanted to know, and I was basically told to do my job as I was told or look for other employment. Like it or lump it.... Since when is it wrong to give a rats ass about your fellow man and want and expect fairness for all.

It paints a rather cold picture doesn't it...it makes me not even want to get up and go in in the morning. I care about people, all people, and yet it seems that this is not considered a positive thing in the work force these days.( I have been sent to a "learning to control your emotions" seminar for caring. What kind of mentality is that and what does it say about our society??

What time preiods are you comparing? Babbling on about how you dont feel well and the extra work you heap on other people just like yourself is somehow only a new invention of the 20th century....

How about you go to sleep and get off the computer untill you get better.

reply to post by Wertdagf


How about you stop being so hateful! Every time you come into one of my threads your comments are useless. Nothing you just said added to this post. If you do not like what I have to say then go elsewhere, its that simple. I never said that I was sick, it was a generalization...look it up! No offense, but your demeanor is prime example of what I am talking about. Was that motivated by love??



[edit on 12-7-2009 by Greenize]

i've worked for several corporations i have to say a lot of it all depends on whom your employer is.

what kind of "culture" do they employ?

i find the older, more traditional style of management is more to the grind, be there in the seat x amount of hours, etc. more on the micro-management side.

i've also worked at corps that have very progressive culture, and DO care when 1 of the team is down. they are relaxed with the hours - you have your deadlines anyway, so you get them done.

i know what you mean though. my last employer never crossed the bounds of working relationship and friend. (at the end of the day it IS work i guess)

...and i've had employers/colleagues that have built long lasting commitment and friendship through working close together with respect and hard work.

i suppose it really is who the work place is. some are bad some are good.

reply to post by Greenize


Hey Greenize,
I know exactly what your talking about. The agency I work for absolutely cares nothing for it's employee's. I've been with them for ten years now and evertime there's an insurance hike they take it out of our pockets. Never have they absorbed the cost to their employee's don't get affected. Now they're wanting to cut out retirement, longevity, and what ever else they can, because they say they don't have the money. Yet they have the money to build city parks at millions of dollars in cost. They just purchased a Kubota tractor that they absolutely did not need for 40 grand. I was like, man, that's just about my salary for one year, what they hey?! Our top boss doesn't even come and talk to his troops anymore, all he cares about is that bottle that he can drown himself in at the end of the day. Our town is on a fast downward spiral into the toilet. There's talk about consolidation though, I'm for it, it will get rid of the upper echelon, and hopefully get us back on track.

To make you feel better there are still jobs and people like that out there. My family runs a small business and for example last month an employee of ours wife had a baby, and it was a month early and there were some complication with her blood pressure afterwords... we gave him 3 weeks of paid. (well the first week was for free, and the next too were his vacation) but, hey were not made out of money. still we went and saw him in the hospital and when he said he'd make the time up on weekends we told him to forget about it, and with the new baby in the house would need those weekends for sleep.

Unfortunately a lot of times when compassion is shown people take advantage of it, destroying that trust. Its a sad fact

reply to post by Greenize


We once had a co-worker of ours get real sick. Like could'a died sick. So he was out for months. So we all banded together and said hey, at this rate, Tony will burn up all his leave so lets work his scheduled work days for him. Now this wasn't overtime for those working for Tony. We were just working his scheduled days at no cost to the city. So the city tells us no, you guys can't do that, Tony has to burn all his leave then you can donate leave to him. We all knew that was BS, all they had to do was show that someone was filling for him on paper, but that was to difficult for some worthless secretary up at cityhall. Made us all pretty mad.

Originally posted by unfndqlt

Unfortunately a lot of times when compassion is shown people take advantage of it, destroying that trust. Its a sad fact

so very true.
good pint.

reply to post by unfndqlt


Kudoos to your family for caring so much. America needs more business owners as such.

Not all companies are uncaring of their employees.

We had 2 employees die recently. And the company is helping the families in multiple ways. Almost the entire HQ where I work is closing tomorrow for one of their funerals, the other one was yesterday, and the turnout was tremendous. The company also offers great health care and retirement plans to all employees. It also runs a charitable organization that provides lots of help to our employees and families, and the communities we are located.

No, I'm not going to tell you the name of this company because I'm not an official spokesperson. Just take it from me, there are good companies out there.

reply to post by unfndqlt


That is awesome! We need more companies like yours!! I didn't mean to suggest that are no good ones, but it seems they are few and far between. My gramdma died last year and my employer didn't even send flowers, even though I paid in weekly to a flower fund for such instances...their response...grandparents aren't considered immediate family!!

reply to post by Greenize


What it comes down to is IMMEDIATE profits. There aren't any CEO's or bosses that care about long term profits at the expense of short term profits because the investors want IMMEDIATE returns on their investments. That is one HUGE reasons why so many businesses have failed or are failing.

Take K-mart for example, when I worked there in the 80's, there wasn't a K-mart around that wasn't PACKED from opening to close. There were at least 6 people in EVERY department at any given time and they were always busy helping customers.
Then some clown decided that they wanted to increase their short term profits by cutting the number of employee's on the floor. The result was that less customers would get help so they would leave and go somewhere else. This started a cycle: Less customers means management can cut employee hours more so less customers come in so management can cut employee hours more...and on and on and on. The initial result was that store managers showed profit based on money used per quarter even though there was a huge loss in sales.

OK so at this point, there are very few employees left to help customers so the managers used to push those employee's harder to get more productivity out of them. They would cut their lunches and breaks short to try and get the same amount of work out of 2 employees, that used to be done by 6.
Then the wages got slashed, vacation pay was axed, overtime axed, etc...
Then they started telling people to punch out exactly at close regardless of whether or not they were done working which resulted in the employee working for free for about 3 hours per week x 80 employee's = even more profit at the employee's expense. Now the employee starts to really hate their job and doesn't want to work hard anymore.

I've seen this happen at a number of companies over the years. That's why I'm now in business for myself and always do my best to treat my employee's very well.

reply to post by jfj123


All of that sounds very familiar!! The company that I work for is doing these very things...and to boot we are about to start charging people for services that have always in the past be free and part of their membership...its totally disgusting!

One thing that contributes to this problem in smallish to medium size companies is the background of the owner/CEO himself. An example, I am in boiler field services, in a technical/engineering position. We have about 400 employees altogether. I have been with the company only a little less than a year than the CEO has been running the place, nine years total. Our owner, and a great percentage of the management just under him, know absolutely little to nothing about what we guys in the field an shop actually do for a living. In other words this man in charge has never gotten his hands dirty. When he may ask for reasons or explanation about why a particular job might have gone south and lost money you can't give it to him because he doesn't know what you are talking about.
I too am witness to many of those same complaints.
Now I get to hear the old timers around the place talk about what it was like to work for the original owner of the company. A man that rolled up his sleeves and built the business from the ground up and could tell any new field or shop hand how their job was supposed to be done, and know what they needed to do it. As recent as 15 years ago he was there and $2500 Christmas bonuses for the working slobs like me were the norm. The old boss was not the same as the new boss, he became a very wealthy man and didn't mind being a little less wealthy so the guys that made him wealthy could live well too. The point being the new owner doesn't because since he knows nothing about the products and services are actually done, it is his belief that the only thing keeping him from employing streeet corner crackheads and replacing us might be a reliability factor. He believes that we should feel lucky that he let's us work there. The old boss new better and when he got exceptional employees that made his place suceed he knew he was the lucky one.
What a lost idea this is.

Originally posted by Greenize
reply to post by jfj123

 

All of that sounds very familiar!! The company that I work for is doing these very things...and to boot we are about to start charging people for services that have always in the past be free and part of their membership...its totally disgusting!

Unfortunately this type of behavior is very destructive to the long term viability of any company. Sad that the people in power are so short sighted.

Many people are ashamed to show any compassion since it's usually treated as a weakness which should naturally be exploited, with the "we're just animals" self-excuse. You could end up being office/family idiot for helping or simply showing compassion for someone else with lower "rank" than you - that's the basic principle and fundamental rule of western life.

Requiring compassion shows that you are weak and probably not competitive enough for the "jungle" which is corporate entity. Real virtues of human beings are in many circles a subject to mockery and represent nothing more than easy profit in terms of more material possessions and higher social ranking.

Luckily that western philosophy of management hasn't progressed much and has only lead to self-destruction. Treating life and work as a constant war with imaginary enemies with ego as ultimate loot results in complete madness and chaos.

All the population reduction issues, evolution vs creation, religious issues and so on derive from the mind which spends time in this constant war I just mentioned, war which only for a short wile stops while we sleep or meditate.

I am sure that many, even after reading this would want to prove that such way of life has brought great, marvelous and splendid things and that compassion is not integral part of human being at all.

Compassion doesn't have any place in the business world. It's "all business." That's what I thought "all business" meant.

Suits and ties, artificially-generated smile, and an outreaching hand. It only reaches out. If it doesn't, that's not business. Then the big wigs go home and sit on their nest egg, miserable, looking for things to buy them happiness.

Business is really just a machine...

[edit on 12-7-2009 by bsbray11]

reply to post by Greenize


I agree. What really gets me is I don't get PTO. I mean c'mon seriously. Every so often I need a vacation and need to still pay bills or I feel like I'm going to explode, but no, I have to work twice as hard after vacation to make up for it. So I'm stressing on vacation about getting back. That's no way to spend your needed time off.

Welcome to the machine. It's heart is iced over and frosted. There is no blood remaining in it. There is no heat, just cold bone chilling apathetic demands.

I loathe going in to work every single day. Seriously not a day goes by that I don't dread waking up to a new day just to go into work and sit within a mess of people running around the office. Even the weekends aren't as good because I know too soon I'll have to return. I feel your pain.

Welcome to corporate America. Wonderful isn't it?