Progressive workplaces mean learning a little patience

“You’re grunts, nobodies, the bottom of the surgical food chain. You run labs, write orders, work every second night until you drop. And you don’t complain.”

When I had just graduated and was fresh in my job, this was one of my favorite quotes from TV show Grey’s Anatomy. I used to watch this part over and over again to remind myself that, even if I was filled with expectations, eager to soak up new experiences and explore unknown lands, this is the only starting line.

When parents and grandparents of our generation share their career experience with us, they tend to focus on one point – be prepared for a crazy workload, poor salary and little positive feedback from your 20s to 30s, because being a newbie, you have no bargaining chip to ask for more. Instead you will gain increasing skills, abilities and values, and take that as the most valuable reward. And one more thing: “Listen to your boss!”

It seems that previous generations have mostly gone through the same pattern. But recently, a fierce discussion was triggered over how submissive interns and office newbies should behave.

An online article entitled “No sympathy can be gained by tears at the workplace” described an intern who complained to her parents in a phone call about having to pick up her boss’ food delivery too many times. She cried that she did not study hard for years to just run errands. The boss later taught her a lengthy lesson – survival rules in the office include suffering from injustice. Some netizens describe the story as “poisonous chicken soup for the soul,” claiming it turned a blind eye to the rights of the weak – interns and new sign-ups in the workplace. Apart from always facing ruthless and merciless attitudes from bosses, even after giving their best, and low payment, they cannot bear the thought that hard-earned degrees do not seem to matter as much as their ability to get coffee orders right, clean up the office, pick up lunch or drop off dry cleaning. This is an interesting transformation. Over a decade ago, perhaps few would complain about such things. This probably comes from our culture of traditional relational hierarchy. Confucianism taught us that, between parent and child, elder and junior, ruler and subject, everyone is expected to act depending on his or her place in the hierarchical order and show respect to seniorities by obeying them. Similar traditions can also be experienced more frequently in other East Asian nations such as South Korea and Japan. Is this wrong? Thousands of years of practice could be proof that it has its advantages.

But times have changed, and so has the development of working environments.

Today’s young adults in their 20s care more about their rights in office. They are willing to work their way up, yet refuse to be exploited. They tend to believe that, if they are not well paid or if they are asked to perform tasks that cannot represent their expertise and education, it is not worth bringing their A-game. It is to some extent, without doubt, progress, yet is not a wise choice to take such thoughts to extremes.

Granted, it is not appropriate for a boss to constantly ask newcomers to run errands. If leaders fail to train their subordinates well, they can never expect them to become qualified talents who could be profitable for the enterprise.

At the same time, office newbies may need to be a little more patient. Of course they can negotiate with their boss or leave the job and find somewhere better.

But the truth is, large-scale unemployment is emerging worldwide; someone else won’t blink twice to do what others dislike. More importantly, the self-respect of real genius does not need to be overly protected, because they always know how to make the best use of every scenario and improve themselves when and where they can.