How can you prove that a company has completely fallen apart?

When a single leaf falls, one knows that autumn has arrived. The changes of the four seasons always follow a pattern.

Similarly, employees within a company can naturally sense how well or poorly the company is doing.

When a company starts to decline, there are usually warning signs. Therefore, once you notice that your company is heading toward collapse, it’s time to prepare in advance.

For most workers, the main reason for working hard every month is to earn their salary. If a company begins to delay wage payments frequently, it’s undoubtedly a sign of serious financial trouble.

As a business owner, one certainly understands the negative impact of withholding employee wages. So if things have reached that point, it means the company’s finances are already out of control.

Wage arrears are a direct and clear signal—anyone with a bit of workplace experience can tell something’s wrong. But this kind of visible crisis isn’t the most dangerous one. It’s like walking down the road and spotting a pit ahead—any normal person knows to avoid it.

It’s the hidden risks beneath the surface that deserve even more attention.

For example, company leaders suddenly start closely monitoring attendance. They hang around the punch-in machine in the morning, waiting to see who’s late, and anyone who is gets a scolding.

Formalism also becomes more serious—work reports evolve from monthly to weekly, then to daily.

Meetings become increasingly hollow in content, filled with empty promises. Some leaders even try to “motivate” employees by saying things like, “Once the company goes public, everyone will get shares.”

This kind of “painting a rosy picture” might still work on newcomers to the workforce, but for seasoned professionals, no matter how nice the talk sounds, a 500-yuan pay raise is far more convincing. After all, no matter how good that “pie” looks, it won’t fill your stomach.

You can also judge how rotten a company is by looking at its promotion system. Of course, the workplace is like the martial world—human relationships are inevitable. Absolute fairness may be impossible, but at least relative fairness should exist.

If a company has no clear promotion criteria and everything depends on the boss’s personal whims, favoritism will inevitably arise. Bootlickers climb the ladder, while truly capable people are sidelined. Over time, the company will be left with nothing but slackers, and its collapse will just be a matter of time.

An even worse situation is when the boss holds a meeting to say the company is struggling and asks everyone to “work together through the hard times,” followed by benefit cuts and pay reductions.

In today’s job market, most people can understand if the whole company shares the hardship equally. But in some shady companies, the cuts only target regular employees, while executives enjoy even better treatment.

Such companies are truly terrible—rotten to the core. Their actions chill employees’ hearts, and we all know what fate awaits a company like that.

Just as “the duck knows first when the river water warms,” employees always know clearly whether a company is good or bad.