Finished University this summer and have begun my first full time job. It's a basic low wage admin office cubicle job. Since starting in October, I've made some observations but am unsure if this is the norm for office work/work in general nowadays:
-
I work 3 days in the Office and 2 days remotely, but the days I'm in the Office it's a ghostown. A whole floor of empty desks apart from a few people here and there.
-
Once a month the Managers and more co-workers from my team come in to the office. On these days there seems to be some strange behaviour, such as drinking in the office (storage cabinets usually have bottles of vodka or rum) or leaving work at 1pm to go to a bar.
-the managers insist on having daily zoom (virtual) meetings with the team, but they never actually relate to the work any of us do. Most of these meetings are used either for the managers to congratulate each other on the work they're doing, or to boast to the rest of the team about various things going on in their lives.
-Any emails from the managers are followed up straight away by multiple direct messages over Microsoft Teams requesting us to drop whatever we are doing and complete their request immediately. Within the first week of work I was scolded by my line manager for not accepting an invite to a WhatsApp chat. I did not know their number at the time and I've received scam invites in the past. I explained this to them and they said it's “not good enough”.
-Alot of rumour spreading and back biting, alot of times from the managers but also from other coworkers in the team, e.g. Managers and coworkers making fun of someone on leave for major surgery, spreading rumours about a coworker being bad in bed etc. This often happens at the regular video meetings.
As I said in the intro this is my first office job, but are these things just the norm now for working in an Office? I understand that everyone has to work in jobs they don't want to at some point, but these other factors don't do much to much to help the tedious work and poor pay.