Cartoons about common work frustrations
Please feel free to use these cartoons in your presentations, university courses, books etc, for free, as long as you drop me at line to let me know what you have planned (telliott at timoelliott dot com),
Top cartoon page here, including links to analytics cartoons, more analytics cartoons, yet more analytics cartoons and artificial intelligence cartoons, marketing cartoons, social cartoons, innovation cartoons, sustainability cartoons, work frustration cartoons, other cartoons.
Corporate travel policies seem finely calibrated to be painful:
Pointless meetings remain a plague of modern organizations… “I know, let’s invite 500 people and bore them stupid!”
Along the same lines — how much money is your meeting costing us all? A corporate all-hands can costs hundreds of thousands of dollars. Are you really making the most of that time?
A handy image that could be used to describe the mood in the image above:
Sometimes, procurement people get in the way of people doing their jobs. Grrr.
Hey! What are you complaining about? That phone was half price!
Trust is built in drips and lost in buckets!
We care enough to do employee surveys, but not enough to actually act on them.
Of course, it could just look directly like this…
Don’t burn bridges (companies and their customers / partners, or bosses with their employees)
Back to office vs work from home cartoon. Everybody knows that (in tech at least) people are the most important asset. Which is why bosses around the world have decided you all need to be more miserable and spend more time in traffic.
Goodwill is something that is built up over time, but it can also run out…
Corporate structuring is always so precision-targeted. It’s amazing!
There have recently been lots of employee layoffs across the tech sector, often with packages for the oldest and more experienced (and more expensive) employees. The customers of those companies must be delighted to see all that knowledge leave the building…
The HR plan: add more stress…
Why is it that every mandatory training seems to be either on a topic I already know well, or completely irrelevant to my job?
Running on fumes… time for a vacation!
Application to so many different situations in work and life…
Sometimes it’s better not to show your feelings at work…
Time for vacations… but still connected?
Back to work… and a mountain of email in the inbox!
The summer is over — get back to work!
“It’s time to take a bold step forward!”
Employee burn out can be a real issue
I just took a LinkedIn course on resilience at work, and this is my cartoon summary…(I’m not even being ironic: it’s about saying “yes, it sucks, but I can’t change what happened and I’m going to decide be proactive and positive about the consequences / future opportunities” etc)
It’s important for senior leaders to give a clear sense of direction to their employees. For many tech companies recently, it’s been this:
Here’s another out of office cartoon:
You want me to sign that new work contract?
…full of new clauses that don’t have anything to do with what you say has changed?
Ever get Mondays like this?
Waking up on a travel day…
So, how is the reorg going?
Don’t like your survey results? Give them a spin!
What bad feedback?
I’m trying to work! Stop sending me emails!
Just in case the wheels are falling off your corporate bus, I have the image for you:
Yes, of course we care about your career!
Two different approaches to performance management… (Stack ranking is where you define a % of people upfront that have to be designed as low performers. It has proven to be a perfect way to drive dysfunctional behavior, as people undermine each other to make sure that they’re not on the list, or avoid joining high-performance teams)
And of course, there are always those development goals, where you have to pretend to excel at something new. Maybe this is the alternative?:
