Comment by andsoitis
6 hours ago
> late birthday recognition.
if someone is going to feel slighted and similar things add up to them working less, they probably are not a great colleague to begin with.
What matters more are: assignment to rewarding work, get paid top dollar, not be bored, get recognition for success, coaching on career growth, given leeway to make mistakes, not overlooked for promotion, etc.
Now, as a people manager, if you're not steering those kinds of things, you are not a great manager and you should be replaced with someone who does those things.
The example was a birthday card, but the mechanism is more important: the manager disregarded a policy in a way that was disrespectful to a specific employee.
People don’t care about the birthday card. They care when the manager does something nice for everyone but them.
Nobody cares about a pizza party, they care that the manager didn’t think to save any pizza for the team that had to do an emergency call out to a client site during lunch.
People are emotional and react in unexpected ways to even the smallest perceived slights, myself included.
A late birthday recognition might not feel important, but if one already feels like management doesn't care about them? I can easily seeing that as a confirmation of it that causes resentment. I can also see it doing the same for any number of management related issues.
I can tell you personally that the action which most seriously affected my performance at a workplace was being denied a bereavement day because the official policy was to only allow one. I felt more than slighted and every single negative action taken afterwards by HR/management, no matter how small, caused me to resent them more.
> People are emotional and react in unexpected ways to even the smallest perceived slights, myself included
Most people react quite predictably to slights. The issue is, if you don't have enough context, you might not understand you are slighting someone.
I think the biggest problem in the workplace is that those higher up, or more successful in a company will put more stock in following the company rules/culture than making sure someone is ok.
Your point about bereavement leave is a good case in point, I had a similar incident where my manager at the time said "Well your aunt's not your close family is she?" when I asked to attend a funeral. I told HR and they went wide-eyed and silent for a bit before ushering me to the comfy seat while they tore a bollock off my manager. Had they not done that, I think I probably would have rage quit.
But why would my manager think that this would be a rational thing to do? Did she thing that one day would mean I delivered a critical project on time (no, I was a junior) My manager made a judgement that it would be fine to reject a bereavement leave.
The point is, now that I am manager, I make sure that my underlings are and feel cared for. The short term productivity for being a prick to them will evaporate in days. If I can't do something for them, or allow them to do something, I say I can't and why.
Am I a great manager? no, because I'm not really organised. But my team work well despite me, rather than because of me.
> I can tell you personally that the action which most seriously affected my performance at a workplace was being denied a bereavement day because the official policy was to only allow one.
One of the things I remember most from my career was a manager "rules lawyering" about bereavement leave when my aunt passed away. Ironically, HR was very sympathetic and accommodating, and it was a non-issue with them.
I've been treated "worse" by jackass execs and managers, but always in the context of work. Someone acting in the way this manager did about a personal situation sticks with me much more than those.
My ex didn’t go to her own father’s funeral because the company said she couldn’t have that much time off. Six months later when she talked about it at work they were horrified she hadn’t felt she could go, but how could you possibly make that up to someone? I think they might have actually worried she would sue them.
I told her to go and we’d sort out her work situation when she or we got back.
It kinda came out of the blue so we didn’t have time to hypothetically it out so we could just operate on autopilot.
Since then I’ve had bosses who heard of a death/critical illness in the family just say, “Go.” No discussion or details needed. Just go. Because being petty or precious about the whole thing just makes you public enemy. And when clever people work for you they don’t always come at you straight on. They come at you sideways and you don’t even know it’s revenge. They just passive aggressively let something slide that made your life miserable.
> being denied a bereavement day because the official policy was to only allow one
I think when setting up policy like this you have two choices:
a) have a fixed number of days --> fair, objective
b) allow it to the manager to use their judgement --> variance across company
The former has the tradeoff that you experienced.
You could also give people an additional unpaid day off if they ask for it. The good thing about bereavement days is that people don’t tend to abuse the policy much given they would have to kill someone first. Dead grannies are only allowed to make you sad for 72 hours sharp, is a bit of a harsh rule if executed without leeway
Or I mean, just treat people as human beings and let them deal with family emergencies? I'm in the Netherlands and I don't think I've ever had a manager that would say anything other than "Take all the time you need" (and genuinely meant it) for a family member who either died or is in hospital/got injured etc. I'm sure there's a minuscule chance of someone abusing this by lying, but I find that if you don't treat people like shit in the first place, they're not gonna lie about stuff like this.
it also depends on whether everyone is treated equally, or whether some are treated worse or better than others.
I always immensely disliked workplace birthday celebrations. I've never really celebrated my own birthday.
If your actual friends or family want to do something, that's fine. But mandatory birthday card signings and having your workplace surprise "decorated" with stuff for a children's birthday party (that gets taken down and reused for the next office birthday) is grim, impersonal, and infantilizing. Nothing at all would be better.
It isn’t about the birthday card. It is about someone with power over you demonstrating through actions that they don’t care about you. As an alternative think of this scenario: I prepared a presentation and arranged for the entire team to attend specifically for a manager above mine who had asked for it. He ghosted the meeting, and asked for a TLDR. Every single person in that meeting felt disrespected personally, and stopped taking the issue that we were meeting about seriously.
Note: If your workplace celebrates birthdays and you don’t want yours celebrated, just ask, they will almost certainly accommodate you.
Being primarily interested in money and career advancement would also make you not a great colleague in many people’s eyes. It’s rather subjective.
Whether people like to admit it or not, very rarely do people work for anything but money and career advancement. You can claim you work for passion, the love of the game or whatever 100 other reasons people tend to give out. All it takes is 2 years of no raises and a couple of promotions for colleagues for you to start not wanting to work for whatever reason you convinced yourself you were working for.
I find a lot of people work at a certain place for the social life, and the money comes second. Including some surprisingly high performers.
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> assignment to rewarding work, get paid top dollar, not be bored, get recognition for success, coaching on career growth, given leeway to make mistakes, not overlooked for promotion, etc.
How likely is one to find all of the above in a job? My current job is essentially the opposite of all of those items. Though, believe it or not, it's not a bad place to work. Just very old school and non-tech focused.