What It Is Really Like to Work in Medical Aesthetics: The Survey

Foreword

01Who took part

Company size

• Over 1,000 employees: 50%
• 100–200: 20%
• Under 50: 20%
• 50–100: 10%
• 200–1,000: 0%

Function

• Marketing (brand / operations / training / digital): 50%
• Sales: 20%
• General management (director / general manager): 10%
• Medical affairs / physicians: 20%

*A few medical managers selected the wrong option and noted their actual role under “other”; this has been corrected manually.

Reading the data

100% of respondents work for upstream medical-aesthetics brands.

Roles are mainly in marketing and sales management, plus some senior general management.

Voices from both large companies and small teams of various sizes are represented.

It cannot speak for the whole industry, but it is at least a genuine cross-section of what people are living through at work.

02The problems people find least acceptable — and that make them leave

• Too many pointless meetings — 60%
• Managers lacking the professional or managerial ability to lead a team effectively — 60%
• Complicated, cumbersome internal processes and systems; low efficiency — 50%
• Owners running the company on personal preference; one voice; micromanagement of everything; no trust; no institutional framework — 50%
• Clocking in enforced on everyone, including roles with irregular hours — 40%
• Performance reviews that are unreasonable and opaque, with no clear mechanism or impossible to achieve — 40%
• Unreasonable bonus schemes — 40%
• Excessive micromanagement (camera surveillance, computer monitoring) — 30%
• Managers who only manage upward — 30%
• Irregular employment contracts or other agreements; non-standard social insurance payment; irregular payment of salary and bonus — 30%
• Owners making false promises and painting castles in the air — 30%
• Husband-and-wife shops, run mainly by family and friends — 30%
• Finance, procurement and HR overriding the business units — 30%
• Too many reports, too often; over-management — 20%
• Overtime culture; holidays and non-working hours routinely taken — 20%
• Serious manipulation by owners, using belittlement and suppression to exert psychological control — 20%
• Complicated office politics; forced into unnecessary power struggles — 20%
• Unfair allocation of work — 20%
• Unreasonable office location — 10%
• Other

In the open comments, several people mentioned:

“The whole company’s commercial direction is chaotic. The two owners don’t agree, so the plan gets rewritten almost every year, changed and changed again.”

“The worst part on the execution side is two bosses each giving instructions, and then being blamed with ‘who told you to do it that way?’”

A textbook case of multi-headed management plus disagreement at the top. For an execution team the nightmare is not the workload; it is direction that keeps reversing and responsibility nobody owns.

Summary in keywords

Going through the motions, a crisis of trust, broken incentives, conflicting direction. These are more or less the sharpest pains of working in this industry.

03100% say it affects the business

Beyond the effect on your own work, do you think the things you have described have a negative effect on the business?

• Clear negative effect: 60%
• Some negative effect: 40%

Reading the data

As a consensus among professional managers — 100% of them — these pain points really are genuine obstacles to business development and efficiency.

These management patterns work through team stability, cross-functional collaboration, and process efficiency to produce wasted resources, discounted strategy, and reputational decline.

, ultimately degrading the company’s market performance and organisational competitiveness. None of which has anything to do with the product, or with the registration certificate.

04Would improvement help?

If these problems were addressed, would it help the business?

Would clearly improve it: 50%

Would improve it somewhat: 30%

Not much help: 10%

No help: 10%

Reading the data

More than eight in ten participants believe change would have a positive effect.

Which tells you: the complaints are not resistance. They are expectation..

People are not simply grumbling; they believe that if this could be fixed, my company would do better business.

05What most needs fixing first

Which area of management does your company most urgently need to improve?

• Leadership (trust, delegation, ability to lead): 90%
• Bonus and performance (realistic targets, fairness, transparency): 70%
• Communication (meeting efficiency, feedback channels, information flow): 60%
• Company culture (atmosphere, identification, values): 60%
• Compliance (contracts, probation, social insurance, non-compete): 30%
• Work-life balance (overtime, holiday scheduling): 30%
• One respondent added a suggestion of their own: “agreement at the top.”

Reading the data

So what people most urgently want is not a few extra percent on salary. It is more professional leadership, professional management and incentive mechanisms, and a healthy company culture.

Raising the professional standards and capability of senior management has become urgent.

There is no shortage of inspirational quotations about working hard. Kazuo Inamori’s philosophy is popular; personally I find it too much like chicken soup, and not well suited to this industry as it stands.

I find Charlie Munger’s approach to work and life more persuasive.

Economically speaking, salary is only part of what work returns. What actually keeps people is trust, fairness and the chance to grow.

It is a way of growing up.

In moving a project forward, in the friction of a team finding its feet, in resolving conflict —

we are tested, and we grow.

And in the end we become the uniquely valuable version of ourselves.

The next few years will be a period of iteration and elimination in this industry, and the great majority of companies will face a test of survival.

A professional manager thinking through a business problem cannot stand only in their own position; they should also consider what the person above them sees, and what the person below them sees.

At the same time: read widely, keep learning, and invest in amplifying what makes you distinctly valuable.

Every stretch of patience and every complaint, every test and every layer of experience, ultimately becomes the armour we wear when we face the storm alone.