Anyone who's interested in working in the corporate sector has heard about MAS, that goes without telling. Before joining MAS, I had worked at two other local companies before, both of which were extremely traditional ("sir culture", strict office hours with no flexi-time, "aiya/malli" culture, nepotism etc), so from what I heard about MAS, I walked into the interviews excited, hoping not only for a good salary, but also a career where I could thoroughly flourish & help others, especially my employer, flourish, at the same time.
Interviews are not bad - you meet some classy people, at least that was my experience. But then, depending on which department you're working in, the work culture will vary. I'll elaborate on the work ethic/toxicity among the planning & merchandising (development + sourcing + operations) teams.
From the get-go, work is piled on. In most cases, the person you're replacing has already moved out, so the work being handed over to you is by a senior or your manager. Depending on their personalities, they will either push you to absorb such an amount of information in such a short period of time that you blow a fuse, or they'll make you feel inadequate in hopes of only God knows what. MAS will preach to no end about SOP's & Lean, but trust me, these practices are perfected at the production level, not so much at jobs such as Merchandising or Planning.
Let's be clear about one thing. Whether you're new or not, it's an absolute expectation that you need to answer an office call, irrespective of whether you're doing a poo, having sex, or just counting birds in the sky. Be ready to marry a good pair of headphones (I suggest Sony with ANC since you won't need to hear any external noise anyway), because your headphones will accompany you everywhere, with your phone & laptop. Your laptop is your consort, & your office phone is your concubine, so treat them nice. Saturday, Sunday, after 7 pm on weekdays, you can be sure that there will be calls coming in, not to mention the mails. Why? Because most of the people you're working with internally are working crazy hours, same as you!
Thanks to frequent recruitments freezing on the front end (merchandising/planning teams), the work is overflowing constantly, so if you're planning on finishing your work & going home on a Friday night, you're best suited working at Dreamworks on fairytales. Work will never end, because a single person takes on the workload of 2 or more people.
Weirdly, recruitment freezing seems to only apply to the front-end teams who are actually doing the work for the company, & not the back-end teams, such as HR - HR constantly gets so many HR interns that we always lost count who these girls were, just that they looked posh & spoke in broken Colombo 07.
Let's talk about HR for a minute, one of the biggest failures resulting in this toxicity. Whenever an interview for a front-end post (such as Merchandising) opens up, HR also has a big say in it. We've lost many great candidates who aren't afraid of hard work, only because HR deems that they don't fit in with the culture at MAS. Nonsense. This culture they're looking for is a fake Colombo 07 posh, with high heels & miniskirts. Nothing else, no core building blocks. The issue here is with the HR heads. We've lost quality HR leaders, who used to actually care about hard workers. Now all that's left is riffraff with donkey shit for a brain. Don't trust me? Look at how many new recruits are coming & leaving before even they are up for confirmation!
But this isn't the only place where HR is failing. The number of different HR managers & their own line of useless donkeys is so much. You'll get an HR manager for recruitment, benefits, compliance, business partnering & so on. So, for each of these subdivisions, you have a plethora of executives, senior executives, AM's, M's & so on. Soon there will be an HR head for "just in case" or "just kidding, YOLO".
Nepotism plays a massive role, by the way, especially for promotions, increments, & most of all, workload. If someone is related to a GM or director, you can be sure they're not going to be overworked or underpaid. But if you don't have any connections, you can be sure that saying "no" to additional workload isn't accepted. Only some people can say "no" to a workload - others have to do it silently, thanking & praising the great hand of the manager above for the additional workload. By the way, there's this thing called Women Go Beyond, but ironically, it chooses to reward "certain" women, while avoiding actual shit scenarios that happen in the company. One of the companies in the group was only promoting women, with little dedication, knowledge or qualifications, simply because it was the decision of HR (balancing the male/female ratio among managers), but is this, too, not sexism?
By the way, kudos to the branding teams that marvellously capture the essence of MAS - work-life balance. Truly, these introduction videos to MAS on Tiktok/Instagram are fantasies better than Game of Thrones! We didn't even have time to look at these videos, let alone experience these.
So, let's simplify some things. If MAS is as bad as this article is discussing, then why is the workforce massive & growing, even in foreign countries? It's because of a particular level of brainwashing that is done since the moment you join the company. You get transport, it's AC too. You get allowances for food & you also have flexible working hours. You get a relatively good pay, & sometimes, even a good increment & bonus. So, they lock you in. They bring fear to you if you bring up joining elsewhere. Does the other company have transport? No? Oh, how sad! Does the other company offer flexible working hours? No? Oh, that's devastating! So, you're locked in, defending MAS with your life.
You might be wondering why no one complaints to HR. That's the beauty of it. It's been done, thousands of times. But either it'll just reach your immediate manager with no repercussions to them, who then make it their personal life goal to make your life a living hell, or they'll hold extremely public meetings with teams as a form of "inquiry", where none of the people feel comfortable talking about their own experiences against a donkey of a boss.
Also, all us of who underwent this shitty treatment went through it hoping against hope that it'll be rewarded at the end of the day - promotions, increments, bonuses etc. That was the only hope we had.
I'm sure that there are some sheep misled to think that MAS is love, MAS is life, & these evangelists will either report my article or take some other action. That's fine. Come at me. Thanks to my career at MAS, I'm well equipped at defending myself & mine by now.
I & all the friends I knew who got fed up & left MAS eventually, gave our everything to MAS, sacrificing family, friends & even love (yeah, some of the people got divorced or broke up serious affairs thanks to the work hours people are forced to work for), so no, I don't have a second thought about anything I've said.
Before you come at me, remember, my thoughts are NOT directed at the entity MAS Holdings, as I've mentioned in my disclaimer. Mahesh sir, Ajay sir & Sherad sir are all amazing human beings, & this beautiful brainchild of these three has resulted in a company that's way ahead of its time, providing jobs to over 100,000 people in a number of countries across the world. There are so many great leaders in the group, who follow the teachings of our 3 Founding Fathers, but the few miscreants who are unfortunately in leadership level are desecrating such a beautiful entity. It is regarding those miscreants, who are spreading & dominating with shameful doctrines, that I have written this article about.
If it wasn't for the cheap labor MAS would have never survived for this long
