The most annoying thing about corporate culture

The Office corporate meetings — By Cybernews

I’m sure you have your favorite pet peeves. So, before I list a couple of the more interesting stories of the past week, I want to engage you in a little discussion about corporate culture.

I had the idea for this list after reading a recent report from Microsoft. According to the company, meetings hijack our most productive time of the day. Various notifications, invitations to other meetings, emails, and endless threads only add to the pain of what Microsoft called the “infinite workday.”

“For many, the workday now feels like navigating chaos – reacting to others’ priorities and losing focus on what matters most. In a time when every hour counts, that drift could quietly drain energy and stall business progress,” the report said.

It seems that what we define as corporate culture is just the lack of culture after all. I listed a couple of things I myself find terribly annoying. Agree/disagree/add yours to the list in the comments of this article!

Random meeting invitations

We all feel that some meetings are unnecessary, but I’m also deeply annoyed by the way I receive invitations to some one-on-one meetings. Quite often, I just get invited to a meeting because someone saw an open slot on my calendar. When I once did it to a person who did it to me, I was told I should have asked first. Ah, the hypocrisy. Okay, to be fair, I did it to my boss, but the same rule should apply.

Meeting of the workingmen ad in the newspaper — By Getty Images

Poor grammar

As you probably already know, English is not my first language. My company is based in Lithuania and, despite having many foreigners on board, I still speak Lithuanian with the majority of my colleagues.

However, our main market is English-speaking countries, so we are a bilingual company. Switching from one language to another is definitely challenging. But what annoys me the most is that many people don’t even try. Especially on Slack, I receive long messages without any punctuation, written in neither Lithuanian nor English, with sentences having no beginning or end. Not only does it trash both languages, but it also makes messages hard to decipher.

Ignorant dog owners

It’s nice to bring your comfort zone to work. However, due to logistical difficulties, I leave my loud parrot, annoyingly cute cat, and two degus at home. Also, any animal at work is a distraction. But at some point, bringing dogs to the office became the new normal. And you can’t really say much about it, because you don’t want to be that b*tch who complains about the dogs.

How many meetings have been delayed because of a little pee puddle left in the conference room? Two for me – and one because of a pile of s*it. Gosh, some people are, and might be, allergic, but do you dare complain?

Excessive use of AI for feedback

I’ve complained about this many times. As a journalist, I’ve been publicly analyzed and criticized since day one, and I know how to handle even the worst of it (without crying in the office bathroom or resorting to cigarettes and wine). But someone feeding a prompt to ChatGPT so it would formulate feedback to you on their behalf? That’s a new level of insulting, and I’m not quite okay with that just yet.

Talking about feelings

The pretend transparency and openness of the modern day is making me nauseous. I think because it is a thing to go to psychotherapy these days, people are also trying to transfer that sort of communication to the office.

Recently, a superior colleague asked me how my week went. When I started talking about some data, I got the reply: “No, I was asking about the mood.” Oj. I had many feelings about my job in my early twenties, but now, work is just work to me. If I’m in a mood, it’s only because I am constantly asked to talk about my mood.