Unreasonable Demands at Work

These are some unreasonable demands at work which a friend H shared with me:

1. Getting a work email on Friday night and expecting the completed work by Monday. (you’re indirectly expected to work on the weekends)
2. Getting a request for statistics at 5pm on Friday and expecting an immediate response. (the importance of low priority tasks are often magnified)
3. Expected to know details about your job when you’ve only been on board for 2 months and treated like an imbecile when you don’t have all the nitty-gritty details at your fingertips.

Basically you’re being set up for failure, which to me is a form of abuse. Whatever happened to being reasonable. We may have a lot of tech gadgets these days but it doesn’t mean that we’ve turned into robots capable of working 24/7. It’s becoming trendy to say, “I want that done – yesterday!” Most of the time it’s not real work or something of value that we’re doing, but paper pushing because you’re just a cog in the bureaucratic wheel. When I ask H, “Are you learning anything at work?” he always says “Nope, I only learn how the system works and how everyone sucks up!”

To me, an environment of trust and respect is the most important factor for employee retention. However, I think most people wouldn’t mind working crazy hours if they are paid as much as the people making all these rules. Like that Jerry Maguire movie – “Show me the money!”

About bookjunkie

Blogging about life in Singapore & recently cancer too.
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2 Responses to Unreasonable Demands at Work

  1. Afsha Khan says:

    Oh man! Story of my life. The whole ‘Statistics at 5pm on a Friday’ thing happened to a friend of mine the other day. She works in PR and her boss suddenly decided she wanted an entire compilation of the work done on a clients portfolio – 30 minutes before they were to leave for the meeting. Lucky for my friend she’s super organised and always keeps a log of her work so compiling it in a hurry wasn’t a problem. But when the meeting took place they discussed EVERYTHING UNDER THE SUN but the portfolio. I don’t think bosses make unreasonable demands – they just don’t know what is a reasonable hour to make those demands. And this BS about wanting things “yesterday” is just sending the whole concept of organisation for a toss isn’t it?

  2. bookjunkie says:

    I so agree….thanks for sharing Afsha. I’ve often frantically prepared last minute powerpoint presentations or reports for my boss that were not needed after all. He used to claim it’s always better to be over-prepared…sigh! And he was one of my nicer bosses!

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