If you are aiming for wealth inclination, 8 to 5 won’t bring you there. This is the real score of the employees at the bottom of the organizational chart. Most of the people would toil at school to have a job like this in the future, but promised comfort is not what always awaits. 

Employees, staff, personnel, assistants, whatever you prefer to call them are the typical terminologies of an 8 to 5 worker. As history portrayed them, they are the white-collared employees customarily working at offices. In the society, an individual would work hard at his education to attain a white-collared job rather the blue-collared one believing to enjoy the financial and physical comfort later on. But in reality, that said benefit is not what seems to be guaranteed. Depending on the nature of the company, be it government or private-owned, the perks of desktop lethargy is not what most people enjoy. There will be employees who work more than 40 hours a week, and even more than 5 days a week. Overtime work is not paid but rather becomes the employees obligation of not fitting everything in the given 8 hours. Depending on the business of the organization, demands arrive left and right, and the job description of a poor office personnel equates to 3 employees. The ratio of work and worker is not right and this burden is carried by the person every single day. Looking at this scenario, people outside the situation would easily say “Why not just leave the job?” or “Why don’t you just look for a new one?” As if quitting a job is like changing clothes. I’ve asked myself the same question for long and arrived at the answer that the speed of quitting a white-collared job cannot and should not be compared to a blue-collared job. The ever prevailing hindrance in quitting is financial crisis. Not all has the privilege of having a safety net which makes the situation harder. 

The hierarchy of position seems to mechanize upside down where the most intense labor and efforts are coming from the bottom descending to the top of the organizational chart; these people at the bottom are even paid the lowest. People under the company’s structure are the unseen hands of the 8 to 5 industry since their value seems not be quantified enough. Capitalization really made its way up to the extent of exploitation of human capital. Even compensated with higher wage, money will never be enough in exchange of a person’s overburden.These people are like feeders of charcoal to the machine (the company) to keep the steam going. While the employee is being paid for his service, there will be one part of him that cannot be equated with money, and that is his right to respect. Respect is commonly neglected to lower positions as some of the organizational heads or members believe that respect is given by rank. The mere work beyond office hours is not the issue but the frequency and intensity of it. As it turns out, the worker’s rest seems to be a paid privilege more than a basic human right. Another keyword I want to stress out is overwork. It is indeed the employee’s job to deliver quality work by maximizing all the skills and knowledge he has, including to stretch his efforts in order to meet the task – but this has limitations too. As what usually happens in a work setting with toxic work environment, coupled with employee-workload disproportion, overwork happens. This is the pile up of tasks to a person more than he can handle, but then the staff is expected to finish all of these tasks at once! Employees suffer from over fatigue mainly because of lack of workforce and sometimes poor distribution of assignment. Jeopardizing the employee’s experience is the blaming or scapegoating system where after all the hard work, the employee takes the all the blame of the failures at the office. For a wise team leader, blaming should not be an option but rather tracing where actually went wrong. Asking so much from an individual employee and breaking the thin boundary between work and rest is already a form of abuse. Employees are paid but not owned. Even the worker with the lowest grade of job deserves to be treated right. These people become slaves of the modern time and has no way out even if they wanted and tried to. 

Human capital is one of the most neglected investment of a company. An employer taking so much from his employee while holding the thought of salary as compensation is a rotten system. All of these toxic events can point us to the root cause – organizational culture. Culture is what adheres a group of people and within the culture are the customs or practices that are accepted as just by the company – even if its wrong. Toxic organizational culture leads to work abuse to poor work performance and ultimately damage of well-being. I can’t emphasize this enough – abuse never left organizational culture. Looking deeply at the organizational failure is the undervaluing of employees. You take so much from them yet you never let them replenish. Company heads knew that they need the workforce coming from the lower employees as they do the bulk of the job yet the carrying capacity of the people were never actually accounted. If the people of the company are valued and the company knew that they would be decapitated by losing their people, abuse should have not be occurring. Within this culture, the vicious cycle of intensive demand and tasks haunting employees one after another goes on and on. As with the same experience, I felt nothing but working like a dog. Despite the injustice in the workplace, compromising or escaping the work is the least thing that I wanted to do. This was my principle of not letting my character be affected by abuse. But as the days go on, everything becomes blurry and I’ve reached the verge of choosing between my principle or myself. With this everyday burden, I ask myself, “What do I get in return?” The dread of coming to the office feels nothing but entering a contaminated place, and this is the suffering our relatives and friends will never understand. My exerted effort was never linear to the benefit I receive let alone my economic leverage. Employees like me just keep going in circles with little to no progress in life. Despite the iniquity, there will be employees that has concern on the welfare of the company in terms of deliverable that only employees below the organization chart knew well – that’s the thing organization heads never knew. 

Toxic organizational culture did not only caused over fatigue to employees but also caused one’s loss of passion, loss of motivation, self-doubt and the degradation of self-confidence thinking that he has no worth. Hard realizations I had in this experience is that employers don’t care much for their employees, but only to the work needed to be done. Moreover, employees are replaceable, when you die, employers will just hire a new replacement.

With all this being said, no matter the turmoil, employees feels of no way out just like the slaves in the old times. As the employees endure each day, a part of theirselves are depleting that no amount of sleep can recover. As this organizational culture persists in the work place, we continue to be the slaves of the present time. 

Photo credits to Freepik Racool_Studio