#1
Bored Panda contacted Jenay Rose, an online business expert who has gained enormous success after quitting her job in 2017, to talk about unethical business practices and why people decide to talk about them.
One reason why some former or existing workers decide to reveal secrets from their jobs might be because they are not satisfied with their role or do not have respect for the company at all. And the expert totally agrees.
“The great resignation accompanied by the rise of social media has created so much more transparency in the workplace via “whistleblowers”, TikTokers, and people who are no longer willing to work for a job they hate, for a boss they don’t respect, at a company that doesn’t care about them.”
#2
Some of the stories shared on the subreddit are really eye-opening, not only from the consumer perspective but also from the potential employee's point of view. “Knowing the good, bad, and the ugly gives us the ability of “hindsight is 20/20" TODAY. This allows us to make better decisions, find better jobs or opportunities, and creates connections (where we realize we’re not alone in things we’ve experienced),” Rose explained.
“It also puts the power back into the hands of the people, because with more information and transparency, more can be done to fix these dark company secrets and actions.”
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When trying to maintain a successful business, companies come across a variety of obstacles every day. While some decide to work harder, others start to use unethical practices or turn a blind eye to the already existing ones. “For most companies, the bottom line is priority over their people, when it should be the other way around,” the self-made millionaire said. “If you take care of your people, the bottom line will naturally improve.”
#5
You know those blankets that we give you on the flight? The airline never washes them. Ever. We just shake them out and shrink wrap them for a later flight. Every once in a while we toss one that's unusable.
#6
According to the expert, one of the factors why many companies have been willing to ignore these issues is because they were able to get away with it for a very long time: “Then came social media, the pandemic (which triggered an entirely new “work from home environment” and changed the way careers look), and the great resignation. These are three core factors that led to the shift in our work environments and the exposure of bad practices with actual recourse.”
Another thing that big corporations fail to realize is that “people are not workhorses. They can’t just keep us in a cage and expect us to throw our lives at them. We are dynamic and deserving of work-life balance.”
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Often, one of the main reasons why unethical behavior happens at work is the climate of the organizations. The Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence conducted a survey of more than 14.5k American employees across different industries to find out how often workers felt the pressure to act unethically and if they were afraid to speak about it at their workplace.
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Some of the most common experiences the participants encountered were rule violations, lying and an unhealthy work environment. Although less frequent, sacrificing safety, discrimination, stealing and bullying were also mentioned as examples of bad practices at work. “While it often goes undiscovered, this behavior puts too many businesses—and, unknowingly, their customers—at risk,” the researchers wrote.
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When it comes to speaking up about these issues, four in five employees said that they felt constrained to speak the truth at their workplace. “Forty percent said that they were often or almost always afraid of voicing any criticism in their organization. Our research also shows that those people who feel afraid to speak up are also likely to be the ones who are under pressure to act unethically.”
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So if you feel stressed out or just generally unhappy about the company that you work for, Jenay Rose would like to give you a few pieces of advice. “If you’re unhappy with your job or career—right now is the time to do something about it,” she suggested. “There’s never been more opportunity to leverage your expertise and passion to find work that aligns with you and facilitates the kind of life you want to live.”
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