Let's talk about bad companies out there

Hi! I've been in conversation with one of my readers "LR Singapore" and we touched upon the topic of companies with a range of bad practices, particularly when it comes to hiring. Certainly, he isn't the same person who has come to talk to me on my blog about this issue - I've had plenty of people come to complain to me about companies which are for example, I was told this story about a company in Singapore that run by a Filipino director who would deliberately hire other Filipinos in order to create a Filipino-majority work environment. The person who applied for a job in this company was interviewed by the Filipino boss but felt that he was rejected purely on the basis that because he was Singaporean-Chinese, rather than because he wasn't good enough for the job and he had assumed that the job had gone to a Filipino person instead. Likewise, there was this other Singaporean who worked for a Danish company and he was worried that he would be passed over for a promotion because he wasn't Danish, that the Danish boss would always favour a Danish employee over him because of the cultural affinity he would have for a fellow Dane. I will go through some of these stories and offer my response as an older businessman who has seen plenty of really bad business practices over the years. But here's a visual representation of the worst business decision in Singapore's history below: in 2 words, Sun Ho.

Some companies have made awful decisions: case in point.

So let's start with LR's comment that some companies have really bad hiring practices: for example, they would insist that you have a degree but wouldn't differentiate between a degree from Oxford and one from a private university that is not worth the paper it is printed on. This is probably a governmental organization or a big company which has a set of rules regarding hiring practices set in stone and that the HR manager executing the hiring process doesn't have the power to change or challenge those rules. Do organizations like that exist? Of course, without doubt, they do. Are these hiring practices bad? Well, it depends whom you're talking to! If you've worked so incredibly hard to get a degree from Oxford only to be treated exactly the same as an SIM graduate, then of course you're going to resent the system. But if you're an SIM graduate, you'll be totally delighted with such a system because you're not discriminated against for having performed poorly in your exams and having a degree from a shitty university. Hence with every set of rules, there are bound to be winners and losers. As discussed in a previous post, different people will have a different opinion about the same system and it depends on whether or not they will benefit under the system or not. Therefore when it comes to hiring practices in private companies, really there's very little regulation and is it very hard to prove that you were discriminated against even when the alleged victim has valid reasons to feel that s/he has been discriminated against.

So let's look more closely at HR managers who refuse to discriminate between graduates from different universities - who insist on treating all graduates as if they're the same. Let's analyze the situation: you see, there are some jobs which don't require a degree at all, I did talk about air traffic controllers for instance in my previous post. It is a highly skilled, highly technical job that is so niche that no degree in the world could be relevant - instead, you undergo training that is very specific to the job and since there are so few people employed in this sector, no university in the world would want to run a course. After all, it's a well paid, respectable, highly skilled job - it's a bloody good job, but there are only so many airports in the world and for a city the size of Singapore, how many air traffic controllers are there employed at Changi airport? Not many - certainly not enough for NUS to want to run an undergraduate programme on air traffic control. So I can see circumstances whereby HR managers simply don't care which university you have studied at because the job you do is so niche that it has absolutely nothing to do with anything you could have possibly studied at university. I am dealing with very complex financial instruments on a daily basis - none of which could have been covered in any undergraduate programme at any university so it is not that I'm working in a job that doesn't require me to use my brain, rather, it is so challenging that no degree in the world could possibly help me do what I do. Thus why even insist on applicants even having a degree then? Why not just be honest and say, "we don't care if you have a degree because it is not going to help you in this role, so feel free to apply and if we like you, we will hire you." For some reason, many companies insist on hiring only graduates which in my honest opinion, makes no sense at all. Is this bad practice? Yes it is, but then so many companies around the world are guilty of bad practice. Let's begin with a case study: meet Angela.

Angela is a highly qualified accountant and had applied for a job at a company which she thought suited her - she has all the relevant qualifications and work experience. During the job interview, she was asked about her family situation - whether she was married, whether she had any children and whether she intended to have children. She protested at these questions, telling the male interviewer that these were very personal questions that she felt were rather intrusive. The male interviewer than volunteered the fact that he had two children and that there's absolutely nothing wrong with talking about one's family - he also pointed out that sometimes they would have to work overtime in order to meet very strict deadlines and if she had children, she needed to be aware of that and make the necessary arrangements for childcare in order to stay in the office till the job gets done. Angela then diplomatically said, "yes I am married, no I don't have any children yet but I'll like to keep my options open on that issue and that's a decision that I will have to take with my husband in due course, when the time is right." What Angela didn't reveal was the fact that she had a good friend who worked in the company - when Angela was rejected for the job, she found out that they had hired a less experienced gay man who was openly gay and more to the point, declared that he would never ever have children ever, not even through adoption because he had no paternal instinct whatsoever. Angela felt she had a valid case about being discriminated against for being a married, heterosexual woman of child-bearing age. However, the case fell apart when the employer was able to justify hiring the gay man instead of her - the gay accountant spoke two foreign languages fluently whilst Angela was monolingual and the company did have foreign clients so Angela lost her case unfortunately.

The fact is even if you find yourself in Angela's position, you can't win - the best thing to do is to cut your losses and focus on finding yourself a better place to work. The fact is each employer has the right to define their own criteria when it comes to selecting the right candidate for the job: I remember a friend Joe once being in a difficult situation which he handled beautifully. He was in a job interview which was going quite well when the interviewer asked him if he liked football, Joe honestly answered yes. So the next question was, "which team do you support?" Joe got nervous, if he picked a team that the interviewer hated, he feared that would work against him. Luckily, Joe's wife is from Poland and the local football team from her hometown is Arka Gdynia. So Joe took the opportunity to explain the connection to the town of Gynia and why they are big supporters of Arka Gdynia.  Note that Arka Gdynia are such a local Polish team they would never play a team in the English Premier League like Arsenal. He then skillfully turned it around and asked the interviewer which team he supported and the reply was, "Arsenal". Joe then said, "oh yeah, Arsenal are totally brilliant, they are the gods of football - Arka Gdynia can only aspire to be like Arsenal one day" which seemed to have sufficed as it made the interviewer smile and Joe did get the job. Joe then heard that the interviewer had a bad habit of picking Arsenal supporters for his department and that his office was shamelessly decorated with loads of Arsenal memorabilia. Joe eventually left that company after about a year, because it wasn't a good place to work especially under that director who supported Arsenal - somehow, that turn of events didn't surprise me at all once I understood all the circumstances.

What about the story about the Filipino director who would only hire Filipino people then? Well then, as unusual as it may seem, the director would probably be able to make some kind of justification for that kind of discrimination - for example, if the company has Filipino clients, then it would be advantageous for the candidate to speak Tagalog and if that is carefully worked into the job description, then they have a legitimate reason to reject any applicant who doesn't speak Tagalog fluently. After all, companies are paying you to do a job and they have the right to define what the duties are for the role - if they insist on having someone who can deal with Filipino clients in Tagalog, then the only thing you can do is to learn Tagalog in order to compete with the native speakers to get the job or decide to look elsewhere. This is quite different from when you're a customer - say you're a paying customer in a hotel in Manila, they would have to provide you a decent level of service in English and not discriminate against you just because you don't speak the local language. Oh I remember going to a nice restaurant in St Petersburg in Russia and they quite deliberately arranged for a waiter who spoke some English to serve my table because even though I do speak Russian rather well, I was the only non-white person in that restaurant so they made an effort to make my dining experience perfect. Quite simply, when you're paying good money for a service (such as when staying at a hotel), you get to make the demands as the paying customer. But when you're being paid good money by an employer to do a job, the tables are turned and they are the ones who get to make the demands - not you. Hence by that token, I don't think you can really complain about that Filipino director making the rules in a way to favour Filipinos - his company, he's the one paying the salaries, hence he gets to make the rules. You don't like his rules? Don't work for him. Just go work for someone else or better still, start your own company. 

And what about the story of the Singaporean guy working in the Danish company then? I found it hard to be sympathetic with that guy because I am the only Asian (though not the only non-white) guy in my company. This Singaporean was worried he would not get the promotion as the Danish boss would rather promote someone who was Danish or at least a white European like a German or a Swedish person. You see, I work in an environment where you're expected to pull your weight and deliver - you're paid to do a job rather than be social there. That's why the company is making a lot of money, the boss is hiring the best people for the job regardless of their nationality, skin colour, social class or sexuality. That's why an openly-gay Asian immigrant from a working class family like me can get a job there because I work hard and deliver results. My boss has a family, he has his own friends, I'm not part of his social life and he's happy to keep our interaction completely professional because he realizes I have my own social life as well. But let's give my reader the benefit of the doubt for a moment, let's say hypothetically, he really does have a boss who will discriminate against people who are from a different part of the world, what would you do then? Well, let me put this to you. If you come across a restaurant which has been exposed for having very poor hygiene (see video below from Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares), would you eat there? Of course not, no way - you would not. And if I were to offer you a job in that very same restaurant knowing what they are like, would you accept such a job? Obviously not. Or even if you did, you should probably quit on your first day (if you had any pride) the moment you realized what they're like rather than be complicit in their disgusting ways. So if this guy really had Danish boss really discriminated against Asians, then he should have quit.

Nonetheless, I would put some responsibility on everyone regardless of their circumstances to get along with the people they work with. In the case of the Singaporean in the Danish company, is he being discriminated against because he isn't white-European, or is he discriminated against because of his lack of social skills? Heck, I remember when I was in JC years ago - there was a weirdo in my class (let's call him Chung - I had talked about him in a previous post) who was very intelligent but had zero social skills. He spent his two years in JC without making a single friend, during his break time he was always on his own, studying. Now Chung was Chinese-Singaporean like the majority of his classmates, so you can quite easily take any kind of racism out of the equation and point out that he had a serious problem when it came to having the right social skills to make friends. I can imagine if Chung went to work for a Danish company, he probably would be hired because he was highly intelligent and highly skilled but he would still struggle to make friends in the office, leaving him just as isolated and lonely as he was when he was my classmate back in the day. So if someone like Chung came to me and claimed he was a victim of discrimination, I would be inclined to point the finger of blame at him for being a bull in a china shop in the social skills department. This reminds me of a situation years ago when this gay Indian friend of mine (let's call him Raj) complained that white guys always say no to a date with him because he was Asian. I looked around the room and none of my white friends dared to point out the elephant in the room - it was left to me because I was the only other Asian guy there. I said, "Raj, it has nothing to do with the fact that you're Asian, you do realized you're very fat. Are you totally oblivious to your own obesity? Most gay men wouldn't want to date someone so fat and you really need to lose some weight. This is all about your obesity, you're fat! It has nothing to do with racism."

Of course, it would be simplistic to say that if you encounter bad people in your company, you should simply walk away from the situation and work elsewhere. Some people don't have that luxury of doing that - I can speak from personal experience as I had to serve national service (NS) in Singapore back in the day and boy, I had to work with some pretty awful people back then. There was no escape, no way I could walk away from that situation - it was left to me to make the most of a bad situation. I have witnessed so many people in that kind of situation just give in to despair and they start blaming everyone else, but that approach has never ever solved any problems for a simple reason. When you play the part of the victim, you're claiming, "it is not my fault, it is someone else's fault, I don't need to change, they need to make things right. I am just going to get angry and do nothing because it isn't my fault." It is pretty obvious why that approach doesn't solve anything if you're expecting someone else to solve your problems! But when you manage to accept that whilst it isn't your fault that you have this difficult situation before you, it is still your responsibility to find a solution because no one else is going to do that for you - that's when you're on the right track to make the best of a bad situation. In fact Will Smith has done a brilliant video when he talks about handling fault, blame and responsibility which he explains very clearly and it has gone viral because he explains it so clearly - I wish someone had done a video like that for me when I was so much younger. So if you've not seen it. here it is below. Please take a moment to watch the video.

I need to ask an important question: why do people like LR have this attitude, that they are almost shocked or upset when they realize that there are some companies out there with really poor HR practices? I think it is a matter of having too much faith in the systems that govern your society - look, when we get on a bus, we trust that the bus driver knows what s/he is doing and we'll get to our destination. When we buy a hamburger from a somewhere like McDonald's, we trust that they are going to serve us a decent burger and that we're not going to get food poisoning from the burger. When we buy something from eBay, we trust that the item will arrive in the post and we don't worry too much about things going badly wrong (and if things do go wrong, you can always turn to their customer service team). Imagine if you lived in a corrupt society where you couldn't trust anyone - from doctors to teachers to politicians, oh dear. Fortunately, we do live in a society where we can relax and trust the vast majority of people around us, because most of them are trustworthy. However, things can go wrong - you can get bad parents, bad teachers, bad bosses, bad doctors and bad politicians. Thankfully, this is the exception rather than the norm otherwise it would be virtually impossible to lead a normal life if you couldn't trust people to do their jobs. Think about the way children in primary school are taught to respect figures of authority: parents, teachers, the police, the military, the government and if the family is religious, the child would also be taught to respect figures of authority within the religion as well as the gods and deities within that religion. At some stage - often during our teenage years (or earlier) - some of us will start to grow increasingly rebellious and resent figures of authority telling us what to do whilst others will remain so very respectful and obedient to authority.

In December 2012, I wrote a piece on my blog about my mother's relationship with the government in Singapore - she is a PAP supporter and I described it as her faith in the benevolent egg. You see, she isn't particularly highly educated nor does she have a lot of self-confidence, so she would like to think that there are others around her, in her life, who can take care of her: people such as her husband, her children, her employers, her government and of course, since she's religious, her church and her god as well. So people like my mother go to bed at night knowing that even as she is asleep, her government will watch over her and keep her safe and that her god is smiling down on her from heaven - so that's why she is so relaxed and can sleep well. This kind of mindset really isn't that uncommon amongst older Singaporeans - I remember an incident when I told my family that an Indian boy in my school had been the victim of extreme racist bullying, my parents were extremely shocked because in their opinion, I had earned myself a place in one of the best schools in Singapore and according to my parents, bad behaviour like that are not associated with students in such good schools. But then again, there's virtually no correlation between one's intellect and one's morals - boys who scored straight As can be racist, homophobic, misogynistic and can be capable of doing a lot of awful, evil things such as bullying. I witnessed what these boys were capable of so it didn't shock me at all - what did shock me was the way my parents were totally aghast that something like that could actually happen, this was because of the way they had such blind faith in the Singaporean system and they couldn't fathom that something like that could happen within their system.

How much faith do you have in the social structures around you?

Thus I am wondering if LR actually has so much faith in the Singaporean system that he is genuinely shocked that there could be companies in Singapore with poor HR practices? I don't know for sure as I can't guess what is going on in his mind. It is possible that this probably has a lot to do with his upbringing but more importantly, whether or not he has been previously exposed to people in authority who are flawed. So when I was in Florida, I remember coming across a rather large alligator in the car park and I got such a shock. A local man saw me reaction and simply said to me, "relax, just walk around it - it won't disturb you if you just leave it alone." I suppose he has seen plenty of alligators in the car parks around that part of Florida! Another American example is the recent scandal about rich people who have bribed good universities to accept their children when they haven't achieved the grades to earn themselves a place there - if you've seen corruption at that level before, you wouldn't be surprised at all but if you genuinely had faith in the admission system, then you would be quite shocked at how corrupt it is. So I am postulating that LR actually hasn't been exposed to that many flawed figures in authority - that's why he finds it hard to believe that companies would actually put up with such bad HR practices. I suppose it is a double-edged sword: after all, if you totally lose faith in a system, you'll become jaded and cynical - you may believe that it is useless to work hard because the system that was suppose to run on meritocracy has become totally corrupt. Hence it is not a bad thing to still be shocked from time to time like that, you may see him as quite naive, but with that naivety comes faith in the system and hope for the future: that can't be a bad thing.

So that's it from me on this issue - what do you guys think? Have you ever encountered awful companies out there who have terrible HR practices? Have you ever worked in such a company? What do you think we should do if we realize our employers are guilty of such mistakes? Are you surprise to find out that there are so many companies out there guilty of such truly atrocious HR practices? Do share your thoughts below and leave a comment please, many thanks for reading.