There's a lot of jeering, I suspect at the headline more than anything, but having documented research can be helpful in changing management behavior. The changes in employee behavior documented here are not ones that managers would easily connect to their past behavior, such as a late birthday recognition.
When you train a dog, you have to give a reward very soon after the desired behavior, otherwise the dog won't associate the reward with the behavior. Likewise, a manager is not going to associate a slight towards an employee with an increase in absenteeism or lower productivity that happens days and weeks later.
> When you train a dog, you have to give a reward very soon after the desired behavior, otherwise the dog won't associate the reward with the behavior
Regarding dog training, one can use a placeholder for the reward. This is useful, for example, if you want to reward a dolphin jumping through a hula, because you will not be able to give the reward at that moment, but for example, you can say "yes!" or use a clicker at that moment, and give the reward later, and it will be clear what caused it.
For anyone training any animal, I recommend the book: Don't Shoot the Dog! The New Art of Teaching and Training by Karen Pryor (not affiliated in any way)
Have we got to the point where we need an article telling us that slighting people doesn't help their motivation? Perhaps the answer is yes when we also compare a worker's motivation to a dog's motivation seemingly without irony.
I suppose the employee-getting-revenge-on-manager equivalent would be playing some loud, annoying sound immediately after the slight, and then engaging in absenteeism and cutting work early later on.
Perhaps it may help to work on your social skills with more intent. People who often find themselves disrespected at work aren't always bad performers but they do tend to have large social blind spots they themselves aren't aware of.
If I find out that management is being adversarial to ICs (eg. not offering to pay 75th percentile salaries, giving crap equity offers) I've put pressure to let heads roll. Similarly, if I've seen ICs become adversarial (eg. quiet quitting, overemployed, ignoring brutally honest conversations to upskill, constantly undermining product roadmaps) I've often allowed heads to roll as well.
At least in the Bay Area, the "Netflix Model" has become the norm post-COVID - pay top dollar, but also be open to fire if interests do not align.
What I've noticed in my career as an IC and management is a lot of lower-mid level management are people who were promoted well beyond where their capabilities. To be brutally honest, the stereotypical snarky HNer who is promoted to Staff Eng with an option to become an EM is the worst hire in any organization.
> If I find out that management is being adversarial to ICs (eg. not offering to pay 75th percentile salaries
I find this funny because it suggests an equilibrium point where 75% of management must be adversarial by definition.
Adversarial is a loaded word. In my experience, the management I’d call most adversarial occurred at companies paying 80th to 90th percentile or higher. The attitude is that they’re paying employees enough that they need to shut up and put up with anything that comes their way. If you don’t like it, we have a list of qualified applicants who will gladly take your place in a heartbeat and won’t complain as much because those paychecks are larger than what they made at their last company.
> To be brutally honest, the stereotypical snarky HNer who is promoted to Staff Eng with an option to become an EM is the worst hire in any organization.
I think the trend where companies made Staff Eng into a pseudo-management role without reports was a mistake. It gets defended heavily by people who hold that role, but in the real world the Staff Eng people I’ve worked with who don’t really write code but float around and tell people what to do and how to do it become bad for an organization over time. It’s a trap because those people are often very valuable right after they’re promoted, but the roles where they become disconnected from writing code but retain the engineer title leads to a disconnectedness that flips toward counterproductive after a few years. It goes from having an experienced person coaching others to having someone with outdated and mostly abstract knowledge who gets to gatekeep everyone’s activities based on how things worked several years ago when they were still hands on.
Maybe I'm a bit jaded, and corporate environments have taken their toll, but I see the employee-manager relationship as adversarial by default. Whether my boss wishes me happy birthday or not doesn't move the needle much. I'm there to contribute as an individual and he's there to answer to his boss about staffing, budgeting, and performance.
Although, I do feel slighted when a manager acknowledges the absurdity of all the corporatisms we hear everyday then proceeds to preach them to everyone and waste time anyway. Like, please, I thought we just agreed this is all fluff.
The big concept which needs to be included in this discussion is "payslope" --- for an excellent article on this, and an example of a company which handles this well, see:
Lee died about a decade ago; I don't know whether they still have this policy. (One immediate change was that their stores started being open on Sunday.)
In ‘our’ field, HP, under founders Hewlett and Packard, ran into some trouble in 1970 and instituted a “9 day fortnight”: rather than lay anyone off, everyone took a 10% cut in pay and hours.
Of course a small company of under 1000 employees is going to have a lower executive pay and therefore lower pay gap/ratio than a Fortune 500 company.
As someone who has a 401k, I certainly hope that the CEOs of our biggest companies are more highly compensated (~competent) than the CEO of Martin's Chicken Shack.
Do you? It is all a matter of incentives. When the sky is the limit for executive compensation and we tie it to lagging short term indicators such as stock prices aren’t we incentivizing executives to focus on short term gain at the expense of long term value creation?
Doesn’t this general climate disproportionately advantage the well connected, the insider traders?
And as a citizen of a given jurisdiction, even if you are doing great in the capital markets, is it worth the living in an increasingly enshittified society?
I hope that the CEOs of our biggest companies will be called to demonstrate the same sort of integrity and compassion which Robin Lee and his father have, and I'd rather have that than more money in my pocket or my 401K (which I've done my best to direct towards investments which I consider to be ethical).
And yet the tolerance for bad decisions is much higher in bigger companies. Make a bad decision at large company and simple intertia will keep you going. Make a bad decision in a small company and you're out of business.
My lived experience in America is that employers often feel slighted by default by their employees, with rare exception. Otherwise they wouldn’t put so many obstacles in the way of paying livable wages for work performed.
That said, half a century of continued slighting of employees is quickly snowballing against them. While I’d hope these studies lead to positive change in the short-term, I doubt anything will move the needle short of mass collective action.
If only it were Surprisingly Obvious. IME there are a large number of emotionally stunted middle and upper managers that could use a pedigreed reminder that being a jerk at work is not good for anything in the end.
If it’s a known company policy and people know it’s supposed to happen, they’re going to notice when it doesn’t. So it highlights that the managers priorities don’t include you.
This article hits close to home. Recently management provided some 'training' for everybody at where i work, specially focused at team leaders/supervisors, about being courteous based on a training that Disney offers around the world. The focus was not only to be courteous to your end-users, but also to those who you manage and are on your team.
I'm really good at my job, and a few years ago i became a supervisor. But not because i was good with people, simply because i am technically competent. My company was (and still is) rather small (less than 20 on the technical side, but almost 200 overall) and there was no one else remotely apt for the job. I was always a 'cold' person, didn't care much about closeness at work, didn't cared about birthdays, company parties (people absolutely love those where i work, and the company spends a good money on it), and i had to make an effort to remind myself to say 'Good morning' to everybody, because it didn't felt necessary. While i treated everybody with the same respect i wished for myself, eventually i found that that wasn't enough.
Fast forward a few years i got better at the basics, but I'm still struggling on the people aspect of it. My team's productivity is good and so is mine, everybody receives good pay and they are happy on that aspect. The only reason to why my team may not have fallen apart, is probably because we still closely interact with other people from other teams, who are way better at this.
> "An easy place to start is simply acknowledging what’s important to people outside of their jobs: birthdays, graduations, marriages, a new baby, death of a loved one, or religious observances. Doing so makes them feel valued as human beings, not just human capital."
For a long time i never considered others would find that important, not at the workplace anyway. When you don't care about that stuff yourself, caring for the sake of work feels fake and people can spot it which may backfire. Is it a case of "fake it until you make it", or just brute-force until you get better on it? I admit it is exhausting. I love my work and what i do on the technical side, and i cannot complain about the company or the pay, but i do sometimes regret accepting that offer.
As a Brit, the birthday card example feels oddly American. The effect seems plausible, but the UK equivalent slight would be something much more informal
Lots of “no shit” in these comments makes me wonder how many VP level managers you guys have interacted with.
Maybe it’s just my location, but this is one of those things that legitimately NEVER makes it through to upper managers.
When they tell their base managers to crack the whip and force them to give the whole “you are not working hard enough, tighten up. Shorter lunches, clock in 5 minutes early, etc” speech to the base employees, they will absolutely feel resentment and do LESS work, not more.
For more than one reason.
A quite small few will be pushed over the edge and spend their energy trying to find a new position altogether. But the impact of losing them and having an open position for months will have a huge impact. The impact of losing even a below average worker is nearly always underestimated by uppers who see their 200+ indirects as just numbers on an HR chart. And the employees who hop jobs over bad management are usually in the top half of performance, not bottom.
Another handful of over-achievers will realize that their “extra mile” approach is clearly being ignored or not having any effect, and simply become achievers. This alone can have an impact that outweighs any potential gain from whip cracking.
The one thing that nearly all employees will do when this happens though: talk to each other and bitch about it. This will tank morale yes, but it more literally just takes a bunch of time and energy. A very large distraction from the actual work.
I’ve seen this now at several jobs in a few fields. The negative impact is so much larger than I ever would have guessed starting out.
If you want to get more work out of the same workers, you cannot use negative reinforcement. It will backfire. Positive reinforcement is not bulletproof but rarely makes things WORSE.
> When they tell their base managers to crack the whip and force them to give the whole “you are not working hard enough, tighten up. Shorter lunches, clock in 5 minutes early, etc” speech to the base employees, they will absolutely feel resentment and do LESS work, not more.
The most influential question from team lead trainings over the years has been: Do you trust your employee to want to complete the task and purpose they have, or do you need to control them? There are a few names for this, Theory X and Theory Y mainly.
And don't be snide and just say that the current economy forces you to work due to wages. A lot of people I know would just create their own creative work if they had all the money in the world. So yeah, I think if you frame a persons job and purpose in the company right, you can trust them to work. This may not work in all industries, but in tech it seems to hold.
An example where this is in my experience a good guidance: Someone starts slipping their metrics, whatever those are. Comes in late, is hard to reach remotely. Naturally they should get slapped with the book right? Nah. If you assume they want to work well, the first question should be: Why, what is going on?
In a lot of cases, there will be something going on in their private life they are struggling with. If you help them with that, or at least help them navigate work around this, you will end up with a great team member.
Like one guy on the team recently had some trouble during the last legs of building a house and needed more flexible time. We could've been strict and told him to punch it and take their entire annual vacation to manage that, even if he just needs to be able to jump away for an hour or two here and there. Instead we made sure to schedule simple work for him and have him work with a higher focus on educating his sidekicks, tracked the total time away and then booked it as 3-4 days at the end. Now it's a fun story in the teams lore they are fond of having navigated that, instead of one guy sulking about having lost all of his vacation in that nonsense.
> In a lot of cases, there will be something going on in their private life they are struggling with. If you help them with that, or at least help them navigate work around this, you will end up with a great team member.
Note that there already has to be a pretty high level of trust between that employee and their manager for this to work; if I don't feel like I can trust my manager, I will absolutely keep my lips zipped about anything not directly work related.
Yup. We just lost our "slightly below average" developers, but he was a nice guy and tries to deliver. But they have been slow to replace him, and now we are likely looking at 3 months before a new hire will just be in place, plus the new hire will not have the three years worth of experience the other guy had, so their project will likely be slower than at it already was for the rest of the year.
I’d take “slightly below average but is generally good to work with and tries hard” over “genius asshole” almost any day. Few projects require the latter.
There’s also the problem with how useless so many are at their jobs with no way to be sure until its too late.
> When they tell their base managers to crack the whip and force them to give the whole “you are not working hard enough, tighten up. Shorter lunches, clock in 5 minutes early, etc” speech to the base employees, they will absolutely feel resentment and do LESS work, not more.
The bosses with half a brain do this only when the supply of labor is increasing relative to demand for labor. The bet is that the sufficient employees won’t have a choice to find a different job, and people that fail to maintain the new pace can be replaced with newer, and maybe even cheaper employees.
A good leader believes in the team and the team’s mission.
Celebrating birthdays and milestones are a possible side effect of this, but these celebrations can’t take place of the power of that belief.
If you consistently smile, you can force yourself to be happier, and if you force yourself to celebrate others, that’s still a good thing. But, your team will know if you don’t believe.
You’re better off being Gary Oldman in Slow Horses (only secretly believing in the mission and with a team that all care) than just being in it for the paycheck.
I’m not saying to quit if you can’t believe, but don’t expect top productivity.
Yeah, I think nobody is gonna tell their boss "I did not like the way you treated me, so I will take a day off for feeling slightly sick". So, while it all sounds obvious, the extent of "idgaf then" is not easy to quantify.
It'll end up being a tick box moment in some Friday after 5 minute management training document that got completed while thinking about what to do over the weekend.
On some level the headline is like "yeah, no shit," but the surprising thing is the claimed strength of the effect. 50% absenteeism increase for missing a birthday congratulations? Really?
I'm now somewhat interested in the study to see how they accounted for possible hidden factors.
If a team lead or manager spent the time to track birthdays and took time out of their day to have a 10 minute chat with someone on their birthday, they probably exhibit a number of other behaviors that could be summarized as "treating their employees as humans". That's the boss people tend to like to work with and possibly go another mile for them.
If tolerating your boss during a normal day takes 9 of your 12 spoons of energy for the day, it takes very little further push to be spiteful. At worst, they may force you to find another workplace with a better boss.
This is a study from an elite institution published in a respectable journal in the social sciences. Certainly they took the time to perform a controlled experiment and assigned managers at random to deliver the birthday cards late or on time. That would be cheap to do and minimally invasive for the human subjects.
[Reads abstract]
They didn't? It's a pure observational study that one measure of sloppiness in the organisation correlates with another? What do we pay these guys for?
I just got my annual review and for the 4th year in a row, no changes. I'm still "meeting expectations" but apparently not deserving of even a crumb of the millions in additional profits I've brought in. I am damn sure not going to work as hard going forward when working hard doesn't even lead to a positive outcome.
> "They found the perfect observational setting in the retail chain, which has a well-established policy that managers hand-deliver a card and small gift to each employee on their birthday. The company designed the policy to foster meaningful personal interactions and strengthen the employee-manager relationship"
> "The team found no issues when cards and gifts were given within a five-day window of the employee’s birthday"
Part of me wonders more now if the slight also comes from the expectation of receiving a gift under this policy? If someone told me "hey, happy birthday, dude" that'd be good enough for me.
A lot of work is fake work. It's just social signaling. It's just a game of being liked. Just look at the stats for autistic people who have difficulty finding and maintaining employment, not because they're bad at their actual job but because neurotypical people just don't like them. Anyone who has worked for a remotely large organization has met plenty of people who have been promoted well beyond their actual abilities or output.
In this space you'll often hear about Dunbar's number [1] and the idea that organizations with more than about 150 people tend to break down. In larger organizations, a whole layer of middle management seems to rise up with questionable output. Like you might have no idea who your VP is. One place I worked had the VP visit once a quarter, walk aroudn and ask what people worked on and occasionally yell at them.
The military is an interesting example because it's millions of people, often in confined spaces so a whole bunch of rules have to be created so they don't kill each other, basically. And if you talk to any current or former servicemembers you'll hear stories about how not much gets done there either. Toxic leadership, lots of waiting around for nothing, bureaucracy and so on.
One can view this "research" as "be nice to your employees" but I think it's more nefarious than that. Or at least "be nice" won't be the lesson Corporate America takes from it. Instead it'll be that employees need to be even more closely monitored so they're not slacking off.
I think about what I call "organizational churn". This is where every 6 months you'll get an email saying a VP in your direct chain whom you've likely never met now reports to a different SVP under some restructure or reorganization to "align goals" or for "efficiency".
What you realize after awhile is that organizational churn only exists so nobody is every accountable for their actions or output. They're never in the same place long enough to see the consequences of their action or inaction.
But what I've thought about a lot recently in terms of organization is the Chinese Community Party. Millions of people work for the CCP. Yet it's output has been stunning. Some 40,000km of high speed train lines in 20 years for less than the US spends on the military in one year. Energy projects, metros, bridges, cities, housing, roads, ports, the list goes on.
How does the CCP avoid empire-building, institutional rot and general bureaucratic paralysis?
> How does the CCP avoid empire-building, institutional rot and general bureaucratic paralysis?
Oh they don't! In exactly the same way US didn't. Right now, a lot of factors have put enough tailwind into Chinese economy and the inertia is a bitch to retreat, as can be seen with US itself. These tailwinds are strong enough that they lift everybody up, even considering the corruption taking its share.
There's a lot of jeering, I suspect at the headline more than anything, but having documented research can be helpful in changing management behavior. The changes in employee behavior documented here are not ones that managers would easily connect to their past behavior, such as a late birthday recognition.
When you train a dog, you have to give a reward very soon after the desired behavior, otherwise the dog won't associate the reward with the behavior. Likewise, a manager is not going to associate a slight towards an employee with an increase in absenteeism or lower productivity that happens days and weeks later.
> When you train a dog, you have to give a reward very soon after the desired behavior, otherwise the dog won't associate the reward with the behavior
Regarding dog training, one can use a placeholder for the reward. This is useful, for example, if you want to reward a dolphin jumping through a hula, because you will not be able to give the reward at that moment, but for example, you can say "yes!" or use a clicker at that moment, and give the reward later, and it will be clear what caused it.
For anyone training any animal, I recommend the book: Don't Shoot the Dog! The New Art of Teaching and Training by Karen Pryor (not affiliated in any way)
Have we got to the point where we need an article telling us that slighting people doesn't help their motivation? Perhaps the answer is yes when we also compare a worker's motivation to a dog's motivation seemingly without irony.
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I suppose the employee-getting-revenge-on-manager equivalent would be playing some loud, annoying sound immediately after the slight, and then engaging in absenteeism and cutting work early later on.
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Engineering managers treat their dogs with greater respect than their employees.
Perhaps it may help to work on your social skills with more intent. People who often find themselves disrespected at work aren't always bad performers but they do tend to have large social blind spots they themselves aren't aware of.
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Indeed. I've had a few of those. I also had a couple that were really good.
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A lot of this is already known.
If I find out that management is being adversarial to ICs (eg. not offering to pay 75th percentile salaries, giving crap equity offers) I've put pressure to let heads roll. Similarly, if I've seen ICs become adversarial (eg. quiet quitting, overemployed, ignoring brutally honest conversations to upskill, constantly undermining product roadmaps) I've often allowed heads to roll as well.
At least in the Bay Area, the "Netflix Model" has become the norm post-COVID - pay top dollar, but also be open to fire if interests do not align.
What I've noticed in my career as an IC and management is a lot of lower-mid level management are people who were promoted well beyond where their capabilities. To be brutally honest, the stereotypical snarky HNer who is promoted to Staff Eng with an option to become an EM is the worst hire in any organization.
> If I find out that management is being adversarial to ICs (eg. not offering to pay 75th percentile salaries
I find this funny because it suggests an equilibrium point where 75% of management must be adversarial by definition.
Adversarial is a loaded word. In my experience, the management I’d call most adversarial occurred at companies paying 80th to 90th percentile or higher. The attitude is that they’re paying employees enough that they need to shut up and put up with anything that comes their way. If you don’t like it, we have a list of qualified applicants who will gladly take your place in a heartbeat and won’t complain as much because those paychecks are larger than what they made at their last company.
> To be brutally honest, the stereotypical snarky HNer who is promoted to Staff Eng with an option to become an EM is the worst hire in any organization.
I think the trend where companies made Staff Eng into a pseudo-management role without reports was a mistake. It gets defended heavily by people who hold that role, but in the real world the Staff Eng people I’ve worked with who don’t really write code but float around and tell people what to do and how to do it become bad for an organization over time. It’s a trap because those people are often very valuable right after they’re promoted, but the roles where they become disconnected from writing code but retain the engineer title leads to a disconnectedness that flips toward counterproductive after a few years. It goes from having an experienced person coaching others to having someone with outdated and mostly abstract knowledge who gets to gatekeep everyone’s activities based on how things worked several years ago when they were still hands on.
Maybe I'm a bit jaded, and corporate environments have taken their toll, but I see the employee-manager relationship as adversarial by default. Whether my boss wishes me happy birthday or not doesn't move the needle much. I'm there to contribute as an individual and he's there to answer to his boss about staffing, budgeting, and performance.
Although, I do feel slighted when a manager acknowledges the absurdity of all the corporatisms we hear everyday then proceeds to preach them to everyone and waste time anyway. Like, please, I thought we just agreed this is all fluff.
The big concept which needs to be included in this discussion is "payslope" --- for an excellent article on this, and an example of a company which handles this well, see:
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/time-to-lead/h...
I have never regretted a purchase from Lee Valley, and highly recommend all of their products.
Lee died about a decade ago; I don't know whether they still have this policy. (One immediate change was that their stores started being open on Sunday.)
In ‘our’ field, HP, under founders Hewlett and Packard, ran into some trouble in 1970 and instituted a “9 day fortnight”: rather than lay anyone off, everyone took a 10% cut in pay and hours.
Of course a small company of under 1000 employees is going to have a lower executive pay and therefore lower pay gap/ratio than a Fortune 500 company.
As someone who has a 401k, I certainly hope that the CEOs of our biggest companies are more highly compensated (~competent) than the CEO of Martin's Chicken Shack.
Do you? It is all a matter of incentives. When the sky is the limit for executive compensation and we tie it to lagging short term indicators such as stock prices aren’t we incentivizing executives to focus on short term gain at the expense of long term value creation?
Doesn’t this general climate disproportionately advantage the well connected, the insider traders?
And as a citizen of a given jurisdiction, even if you are doing great in the capital markets, is it worth the living in an increasingly enshittified society?
I hope that the CEOs of our biggest companies will be called to demonstrate the same sort of integrity and compassion which Robin Lee and his father have, and I'd rather have that than more money in my pocket or my 401K (which I've done my best to direct towards investments which I consider to be ethical).
And yet the tolerance for bad decisions is much higher in bigger companies. Make a bad decision at large company and simple intertia will keep you going. Make a bad decision in a small company and you're out of business.
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Conversely, I wonder if employers who feel slighted by those employees, pay and promote them less.
My lived experience in America is that employers often feel slighted by default by their employees, with rare exception. Otherwise they wouldn’t put so many obstacles in the way of paying livable wages for work performed.
That said, half a century of continued slighting of employees is quickly snowballing against them. While I’d hope these studies lead to positive change in the short-term, I doubt anything will move the needle short of mass collective action.
I understand the co-authors are research fellows at the Maximegalon Institute of Slowly and Painfully Working Out the Surprisingly Obvious
If only it were Surprisingly Obvious. IME there are a large number of emotionally stunted middle and upper managers that could use a pedigreed reminder that being a jerk at work is not good for anything in the end.
Would the people who need such a reminder actually accept the research, and change their behavior?
Are they even aware of the effects of their behavior?
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> the retail chain, which has a well-established policy that managers hand-deliver a card and small gift to each employee on their birthday.
> The faux pas was never intentional; the managers who were late said they had other priorities.
If it's such a well known company policy and you forget that, it is not a small slight at all.
If it’s a known company policy and people know it’s supposed to happen, they’re going to notice when it doesn’t. So it highlights that the managers priorities don’t include you.
Exactly, and even worse, I'm sure the managers remember some people's birthdays.
This article hits close to home. Recently management provided some 'training' for everybody at where i work, specially focused at team leaders/supervisors, about being courteous based on a training that Disney offers around the world. The focus was not only to be courteous to your end-users, but also to those who you manage and are on your team.
I'm really good at my job, and a few years ago i became a supervisor. But not because i was good with people, simply because i am technically competent. My company was (and still is) rather small (less than 20 on the technical side, but almost 200 overall) and there was no one else remotely apt for the job. I was always a 'cold' person, didn't care much about closeness at work, didn't cared about birthdays, company parties (people absolutely love those where i work, and the company spends a good money on it), and i had to make an effort to remind myself to say 'Good morning' to everybody, because it didn't felt necessary. While i treated everybody with the same respect i wished for myself, eventually i found that that wasn't enough. Fast forward a few years i got better at the basics, but I'm still struggling on the people aspect of it. My team's productivity is good and so is mine, everybody receives good pay and they are happy on that aspect. The only reason to why my team may not have fallen apart, is probably because we still closely interact with other people from other teams, who are way better at this.
> "An easy place to start is simply acknowledging what’s important to people outside of their jobs: birthdays, graduations, marriages, a new baby, death of a loved one, or religious observances. Doing so makes them feel valued as human beings, not just human capital."
For a long time i never considered others would find that important, not at the workplace anyway. When you don't care about that stuff yourself, caring for the sake of work feels fake and people can spot it which may backfire. Is it a case of "fake it until you make it", or just brute-force until you get better on it? I admit it is exhausting. I love my work and what i do on the technical side, and i cannot complain about the company or the pay, but i do sometimes regret accepting that offer.
As a Brit, the birthday card example feels oddly American. The effect seems plausible, but the UK equivalent slight would be something much more informal
I wonder if this is generationally specific. I'm an American and have zero expectation that anybody at work should acknowledge my birthday.
On the other hand, I can understand feeling slighted if the manager consistently recognizes their employees' birthdays but overlooks mine.
Lots of “no shit” in these comments makes me wonder how many VP level managers you guys have interacted with. Maybe it’s just my location, but this is one of those things that legitimately NEVER makes it through to upper managers.
When they tell their base managers to crack the whip and force them to give the whole “you are not working hard enough, tighten up. Shorter lunches, clock in 5 minutes early, etc” speech to the base employees, they will absolutely feel resentment and do LESS work, not more.
For more than one reason.
A quite small few will be pushed over the edge and spend their energy trying to find a new position altogether. But the impact of losing them and having an open position for months will have a huge impact. The impact of losing even a below average worker is nearly always underestimated by uppers who see their 200+ indirects as just numbers on an HR chart. And the employees who hop jobs over bad management are usually in the top half of performance, not bottom.
Another handful of over-achievers will realize that their “extra mile” approach is clearly being ignored or not having any effect, and simply become achievers. This alone can have an impact that outweighs any potential gain from whip cracking.
The one thing that nearly all employees will do when this happens though: talk to each other and bitch about it. This will tank morale yes, but it more literally just takes a bunch of time and energy. A very large distraction from the actual work.
I’ve seen this now at several jobs in a few fields. The negative impact is so much larger than I ever would have guessed starting out.
If you want to get more work out of the same workers, you cannot use negative reinforcement. It will backfire. Positive reinforcement is not bulletproof but rarely makes things WORSE.
Manage smarter not harder.
> When they tell their base managers to crack the whip and force them to give the whole “you are not working hard enough, tighten up. Shorter lunches, clock in 5 minutes early, etc” speech to the base employees, they will absolutely feel resentment and do LESS work, not more.
The most influential question from team lead trainings over the years has been: Do you trust your employee to want to complete the task and purpose they have, or do you need to control them? There are a few names for this, Theory X and Theory Y mainly.
And don't be snide and just say that the current economy forces you to work due to wages. A lot of people I know would just create their own creative work if they had all the money in the world. So yeah, I think if you frame a persons job and purpose in the company right, you can trust them to work. This may not work in all industries, but in tech it seems to hold.
An example where this is in my experience a good guidance: Someone starts slipping their metrics, whatever those are. Comes in late, is hard to reach remotely. Naturally they should get slapped with the book right? Nah. If you assume they want to work well, the first question should be: Why, what is going on?
In a lot of cases, there will be something going on in their private life they are struggling with. If you help them with that, or at least help them navigate work around this, you will end up with a great team member.
Like one guy on the team recently had some trouble during the last legs of building a house and needed more flexible time. We could've been strict and told him to punch it and take their entire annual vacation to manage that, even if he just needs to be able to jump away for an hour or two here and there. Instead we made sure to schedule simple work for him and have him work with a higher focus on educating his sidekicks, tracked the total time away and then booked it as 3-4 days at the end. Now it's a fun story in the teams lore they are fond of having navigated that, instead of one guy sulking about having lost all of his vacation in that nonsense.
> In a lot of cases, there will be something going on in their private life they are struggling with. If you help them with that, or at least help them navigate work around this, you will end up with a great team member.
Note that there already has to be a pretty high level of trust between that employee and their manager for this to work; if I don't feel like I can trust my manager, I will absolutely keep my lips zipped about anything not directly work related.
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Yup. We just lost our "slightly below average" developers, but he was a nice guy and tries to deliver. But they have been slow to replace him, and now we are likely looking at 3 months before a new hire will just be in place, plus the new hire will not have the three years worth of experience the other guy had, so their project will likely be slower than at it already was for the rest of the year.
I’d take “slightly below average but is generally good to work with and tries hard” over “genius asshole” almost any day. Few projects require the latter.
There’s also the problem with how useless so many are at their jobs with no way to be sure until its too late.
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> When they tell their base managers to crack the whip and force them to give the whole “you are not working hard enough, tighten up. Shorter lunches, clock in 5 minutes early, etc” speech to the base employees, they will absolutely feel resentment and do LESS work, not more.
The bosses with half a brain do this only when the supply of labor is increasing relative to demand for labor. The bet is that the sufficient employees won’t have a choice to find a different job, and people that fail to maintain the new pace can be replaced with newer, and maybe even cheaper employees.
I agree with everything you are saying, but it’s still a “oh well, no shit, Sherlock” research. Coming up next: Water is wet.
Yes. We needed an essay to crack this one
A good leader believes in the team and the team’s mission.
Celebrating birthdays and milestones are a possible side effect of this, but these celebrations can’t take place of the power of that belief.
If you consistently smile, you can force yourself to be happier, and if you force yourself to celebrate others, that’s still a good thing. But, your team will know if you don’t believe.
You’re better off being Gary Oldman in Slow Horses (only secretly believing in the mission and with a team that all care) than just being in it for the paycheck.
I’m not saying to quit if you can’t believe, but don’t expect top productivity.
This seems obvious but I guess needs 'official research' to register.
A quote I remember from a coleage - 'They wouldn't give me a pay rate rise, so I gave myself one, by working less hours in a day'
Yeah, I think nobody is gonna tell their boss "I did not like the way you treated me, so I will take a day off for feeling slightly sick". So, while it all sounds obvious, the extent of "idgaf then" is not easy to quantify.
It'll never register, lol.
It'll end up being a tick box moment in some Friday after 5 minute management training document that got completed while thinking about what to do over the weekend.
> It'll never register, lol.
Which is why people do it.
You get fired if you just stop showing up on Thursdays, but not if you start reading comics on your phone for the first hour of every workday.
I wonder if this is true for PhD students
Bad PIs seem to be a real problem.
Luckily I'm self-funded and with good supervisors, so not a problem that I face!
It’s just their roundabout way of complaining about their boss forgetting their birthday.
On some level the headline is like "yeah, no shit," but the surprising thing is the claimed strength of the effect. 50% absenteeism increase for missing a birthday congratulations? Really?
I'm now somewhat interested in the study to see how they accounted for possible hidden factors.
If a team lead or manager spent the time to track birthdays and took time out of their day to have a 10 minute chat with someone on their birthday, they probably exhibit a number of other behaviors that could be summarized as "treating their employees as humans". That's the boss people tend to like to work with and possibly go another mile for them.
If tolerating your boss during a normal day takes 9 of your 12 spoons of energy for the day, it takes very little further push to be spiteful. At worst, they may force you to find another workplace with a better boss.
This is a study from an elite institution published in a respectable journal in the social sciences. Certainly they took the time to perform a controlled experiment and assigned managers at random to deliver the birthday cards late or on time. That would be cheap to do and minimally invasive for the human subjects.
[Reads abstract]
They didn't? It's a pure observational study that one measure of sloppiness in the organisation correlates with another? What do we pay these guys for?
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I don't really mind but I take a slight objection to supposedly confidential data (like birthday) being widely shared even with good intentions.
Birthdays are hardly confidential.
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Base rate is likely quite low.
I just got my annual review and for the 4th year in a row, no changes. I'm still "meeting expectations" but apparently not deserving of even a crumb of the millions in additional profits I've brought in. I am damn sure not going to work as hard going forward when working hard doesn't even lead to a positive outcome.
A surprising effect, who would imagine it?
From the further linked https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/when-employees-f... -
> "They found the perfect observational setting in the retail chain, which has a well-established policy that managers hand-deliver a card and small gift to each employee on their birthday. The company designed the policy to foster meaningful personal interactions and strengthen the employee-manager relationship"
> "The team found no issues when cards and gifts were given within a five-day window of the employee’s birthday"
Part of me wonders more now if the slight also comes from the expectation of receiving a gift under this policy? If someone told me "hey, happy birthday, dude" that'd be good enough for me.
Thanks professor, my boss didn't believe me when I tried to hint it
Is paying $20 to read this the only option?
Addendum:
Tables from the study available here: https://www.pnas.org/action/downloadSupplement?doi=10.1073%2...
Breaking news: when it rains, people get wet
how does most academia ever get funding?
yeah why have data when you can just use vibes
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A lot of work is fake work. It's just social signaling. It's just a game of being liked. Just look at the stats for autistic people who have difficulty finding and maintaining employment, not because they're bad at their actual job but because neurotypical people just don't like them. Anyone who has worked for a remotely large organization has met plenty of people who have been promoted well beyond their actual abilities or output.
In this space you'll often hear about Dunbar's number [1] and the idea that organizations with more than about 150 people tend to break down. In larger organizations, a whole layer of middle management seems to rise up with questionable output. Like you might have no idea who your VP is. One place I worked had the VP visit once a quarter, walk aroudn and ask what people worked on and occasionally yell at them.
The military is an interesting example because it's millions of people, often in confined spaces so a whole bunch of rules have to be created so they don't kill each other, basically. And if you talk to any current or former servicemembers you'll hear stories about how not much gets done there either. Toxic leadership, lots of waiting around for nothing, bureaucracy and so on.
One can view this "research" as "be nice to your employees" but I think it's more nefarious than that. Or at least "be nice" won't be the lesson Corporate America takes from it. Instead it'll be that employees need to be even more closely monitored so they're not slacking off.
I think about what I call "organizational churn". This is where every 6 months you'll get an email saying a VP in your direct chain whom you've likely never met now reports to a different SVP under some restructure or reorganization to "align goals" or for "efficiency".
What you realize after awhile is that organizational churn only exists so nobody is every accountable for their actions or output. They're never in the same place long enough to see the consequences of their action or inaction.
But what I've thought about a lot recently in terms of organization is the Chinese Community Party. Millions of people work for the CCP. Yet it's output has been stunning. Some 40,000km of high speed train lines in 20 years for less than the US spends on the military in one year. Energy projects, metros, bridges, cities, housing, roads, ports, the list goes on.
How does the CCP avoid empire-building, institutional rot and general bureaucratic paralysis?
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number
I think you'd enjoy reading about the Gervais Principle. It's pretty much what you're talking about.
https://www.ribbonfarm.com/the-gervais-principle/
> How does the CCP avoid empire-building, institutional rot and general bureaucratic paralysis?
Oh they don't! In exactly the same way US didn't. Right now, a lot of factors have put enough tailwind into Chinese economy and the inertia is a bitch to retreat, as can be seen with US itself. These tailwinds are strong enough that they lift everybody up, even considering the corruption taking its share.
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