I work for one of these multinational justice system transcription companies (like, their product/service is court and police transcripts), but not naming names. Worked for them for something like five years. A lot has changed in terms of automation being brought in (speech to text programs) but they're still not as good as humans, so humans are still needed as well. These are big companies whose sole aim is to automate away transcripts and captioning and they treat their workers like robots as a result.
There's constant oversight of every little thing you do, which you must record on your time management system (or TMS) like you're some kind of lawyer charging billable hours. Obviously there's no entry for things like taking a shit or socialising or taking a break, so anything necessary you do that's auxiliary to your work is dragging your productivity down. And they expect you to achieve “X” productivity level and send you a monthly email telling you if you did or didn't achieve it, sort of as a way to put soft pressure on you I suppose.
This toxic supervisory style is terrible on someone with my personality, a perfectionist law graduate with a diagnosed anxiety disorder. It just results in me wanting to work less with the company, because I'm so stressed every single second of every day I'm on the clock, that I feel like relaxing or talking to people (positive and uplifting for me the individual, negative to the company's bottom dollar) is not worth doing because it will drag down my productivity. I guess this bears very high similarity to how Amazon treats its warehouse pickers. Even though my situation is not as bad as Amazon, this isn't a suffering Olympics – all unnecessary suffering is bad suffering.
Anyway I ended up forcibly taken to the hospital blitzed out on a variety of substances and then spat out by the public mental health system. I had my boyfriend email work with a form for a month off on unpaid leave and they haven't replied. Then I emailed them about possibly working 20 a week (no, I'm not Doreen) and they still haven't replied. The work culture is such that I think middle management feel overworked and overwhelmed, so much so that they don't have the time to reply to emails, just because so many good people have left.
I have a draft email sitting in my outbox which gives them demands, like, no more monthly productivity reviews, no more annual performance reviews, because seriously. You need me more than I need you. This company is a house of cards. I'm trying to make it work, but they need to work with me. There's plenty of workplaces with less stressful attitudes which say, “As long as you get the work done and at a good quality, that's good enough.” That don't treat their employees like robots.
I'm beginning to think the only non stressful work is self employment, huh. My boyfriend warned me against going into a contractor role, which has less benefits, but I feel that contracting may be more my style than employment. The only reason I went with a company in the first place is my discomfort with having to ask people for money (to pay me) as I'm not a confrontational person, so I guess that's the only hang-up preventing me from doing my own thing. Probably the reason why companies exist in the first place.
Is anyone else working in a similar field and wondering what the hell is going on in upper management's minds to create such cultures of toxicity, which surely lose the cost-benefit analysis of human capital in the end? Can anyone in management explain why they impose these horrendous Gestapo systems on workplaces?