Not sure I have much to contribute on strategies and tactics in the world of work, but just to add yet another echo, <polite=on>heck<polite=off> yeah!
Work has been like some sort of sentence of torture sometimes. And not so much the job itself, but navigating everyone else, primarily one's colleagues. But the social/work conflicts and troubles aside, and for what it's worth, my view was as a general rule it's the larger and more profit oriented companies that are the more likely to be a nightmare for non-typical people.
And occasionally it's been a surprise when someone has, seemingly out of nowhere, got my back over some small, but significant thing, but that's people not companies.
It seems the more focussed a company is on profit, the less they are about their own people. Or maybe more accurately, the question is, who are their people? As you go through the environment of these organisations you'll see that "our people" become higher and higher levels of management. While the people who do the actual work to produce that companies profits, are regarded as company resources. These are the companies who most abuse these fake 'badges' of honour, like (in the UK) the "Investors in People" accreditation, which for these companies are just box-ticking exercises that are really investing in profits, not staff. These people can, and will do anything they can to enrich themselves at the expense of their teams, peers, even their shareholders if it's worth doing, and I've seen it myself (not third party stories), and most distasteful it is too.
But for me, the light at the end of the sewer, was, following a most loving and caring redundancy (where's the sarcasm emoji?), when the company found a way to dump a bunch of techies, and replace with an overseas phone support system, after a few years of ill health and unemployment and the sorts of things that go hand in hand with those, I got back into work, via the most fortunate luck of having my CV spotted by a recruiter searching for candidates for an IT position with a non-profit company, working in the healthcare sector, and this has been an eye-opener for me, being so used to commercial sectors.
They are far from perfect, and even have a few glaring issues that I'd never have thought they would being who they are, but that aside (and show me perfection anyway, not seen any myself!) there seems to be a shift of driving forces (unsurprisingly really) with a focus on the bottom line being that of providing the best care possible for their service users. For all their faults, they mostly seem to genuinely care about their staff (who, lets face it, are the company), and while there'll always be some people who should be in their job, generally I feel comfortable, morally speaking as well, working for them. Maybe they are an exception, but I have to wonder how much this sort of ethos is effected by a companies ultimate purpose?
