This place is no good. Professional development consists of you seeing a colleague quit (or more likely have their job moved to Manila) and then be asked to take over their job on top of yours with perhaps a nod to a pay rise (and not like a big nod as in “yeah I’d love another beer” but more like a small, barely perceptible nod like when you’re on a date on a Friday at the same bar you had a date on Wednesday night and you see Girl Wednesday and you need to acknowledge her existence without tipping off Girl Friday).
Let’s keep talking pay for a bit more and how your salary and bonuses are seemingly determined but a game of Wheel of Fortune. Will you be earning enough to pay your rent comfortably or will it be that the two rounds of Friday arvo drinks means it’s pretty much below the poverty line until next payday? Only the wheel knows that.
You might be thinking, “hey, as long as it’s pretty cruisy I could put up with that,” but that’s where you’d be wrong. Management style falls into two categories here. The first is that you’re so under the radar that you could probably stick Wilson from Castaway on a broomstick at your desk on any given Tuesday and no one would notice. If you’re in this camp forget about feedback or guidance, you turn up to be bored for the day and clock out.
That is better than style two though, where it’s just absolute micro-management. In this camp, you get to forget about independent thought or using your skills picked up in previous jobs or years of tertiary education, do what you’re told until you’re told not to do what you were told and told to do what you weren’t told. Got it?
You’d think with all this management would be able to tell why morale levels are about as high as they were on the Titanic half an hour after hitting that iceberg, but nope.
Forget systematic change or taking on board what they’re told in those anonymous (or are they?) staff surveys it’s “here’s a few drinks on Friday arvo after work, now buckle up for another three months of the same.”