Work Frustration Cartoons

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),

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Corporate travel policies seem finely calibrated to be painful:

Cartoon, woman saying "if you still want to travel, the corporate policy isn't miserable enough yet"

Pointless meetings remain a plague of modern organizations… “I know, let’s invite 500 people and bore them stupid!”

Your meeting should have been an email. A hand holding burning money.

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?

Cartoon: the purpose of this meeting is to illustrate how much money we waste in meetings (with a pile of burning money on the table)

A handy image that could be used to describe the mood in the image above:

business people looking angry, with spikes and pitchforks

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.

A cartoon about ignoring employee feedback

Of course, it could just look directly like this…

A trash can full of papers marked "Employee Feedback"

Don’t burn bridges (companies and their customers / partners, or bosses with their employees)

A cartoon showing a burning bridge between two cliffs

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.

A CEO pointing to a back to office slide. "Our people are our most important asset. Which is why I've decided you all need to spend 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…

Cartoon about layoffs of experienced employees: a CEO on stage announces to an audience of customers: "Great news customers! We have successfully offboarded thousands of our most experienced product experts!"

The HR plan: add more stress…

HR cartoon: current plan is to add more stress, and add more anti-stress courses

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?

Man lying back in a swimming pool shaped like an iphone
Woman lying back in a swimming pool shaped like an iphone

Back to work… and a mountain of email in the inbox!

The summer is over — get back to work!

A businessman slapping a man wearing a Hawaiian shirt -- "get back to work!"

“It’s time to take a bold step forward!”

Cartoon: man leading others off a cliff: "it's time to take a bold step forward!"

Employee burn out can be a real issue

Cartoon illustration: a businessman with a burnt match as a head

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)


Cartoon of a businessman with a black eye and a thumbs up. Caption says "Resilience is... being positive about being punched in the face"

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:

Cartoon of an executive pointing at the exit, with the caption "it's important for senior leaders to give employees a clear sense of direction"

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!

Cartoon: a businessman and a businesswoman about to spin the results of a survey in a blender

What bad feedback?

Cartoon: a blindfolded businesswomen avoids reading the employee feedback forms

I’m trying to work! Stop sending me emails!

Cartoon: a man is walking on a path but is blocked by a torrent of emails