A NEW PHRASE, "working idly for extra hours", which refers to people staying in office after office hours of only because the boss is still there, has been gaining popularity on domestic social media networks. Thepaper.cn comments:

This tendency tends to exist in big enterprises with multiple levels of management, or those with bureaucratic management styles. In these companies, many staff members do not know what to do to improve themselves, so they just choose the shortcut of flattering their boss.

It should be noted that people often pass the buck to each other in such enterprises, because there is often no clear division of tasks and employees are unsure of what their responsibilities are.

In this culture, some people tend to pretend to work hard instead of truly working hard. Once some start doing it, others follow their example. Eventually, employees believe their low efficiency is normal and they resist any attempt to raise it.

Thus it is a common phenomenon in such enterprises: They often recruit large numbers of people to fill their vacancies, but are always short of hands when it comes to doing the actual work.

This phenomenon reflects the poor management culture in these enterprises. When the office workers need to pretend to be working, it means there is not an effective performance evaluation system that can let the managers know employees are working and what they are working on.

Such a poor corporate culture means these companies will lose in the competition against emerging small, agile, highly efficient companies. The companies that can properly encourage their limited number of staff to do the best will win, while the companies that do the opposite will lose.

The future belongs to those companies that can best motivate their employees to shoulder their responsibilities to complete clearly defined tasks.