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The worst morale-boosting gesture I've experienced
- HelloNurse 7y agoCustom made motivational posters, with elegantly typeset quotations and slogans. Part of the same great rebranding/reorganization initiative in which employees got company-branded mugs and pens.
- howard941 7y agoWell at least they tried. I'm in a Fortune 500 with no IC/TC promotion path that spams the entire company with promotion announcements that land like insults every week.
- maxxxxx 7y agoI see those all the time too well knowing that for me that for me any further promotion is close to impossible. One thing that happened a few years ago was that I was on an improvement project that supposedly saved the company millions of dollars. At the end we won an award and i received an email talking about a big party at headquarters with great entertainment and good food where people could mingle with top management and the board of directors. It described what fantastic opportunity this would be. This went on for paragraphs. Then the last paragraph said something like “by the way to save money we will send only the project lead and your management (who had nothing to do with the project) to the event but you will also get a nice plaque instead of the $500 or so gift card that used to be normal for this type of award. “. I still don’t know how anyone could write this and not see how crazy it was. Anyways this was a good reminder to look after myself and not be a “team player”.
- GordonS 7y agoBy chance does the company name begin with "C"? I think I work there...
- howard941 7y agoIt doesn't but they're interchangeable like that, all cut from the cloth (mine starts with an S). It's nice to see you on HN!
- wyldfire 7y agoIt's way better than the secret promotions that happened where I used to work (a fortune 500 company). The levels were spaced much farther apart than FAANG and when someone did get promoted you'd only find out if they decided to make a change to their email signature.
- howard941 7y agoI'd prefer that. We're big enough that there are nice promotions every week upgrading marketing/sales and M&A people into upper management. The last (last as in terminal, final) time I privately asked about promotion pathways all it got me was the manager's ridicule in a later engrg department meeting.
- mieseratte 7y agoReminds of a job where they would wait until the last day to announce someone was quitting. Management required the resigning employee to keep quiet. So hand-over then became a mad-dash for all involved.
- Areading314 7y agoOn a team with many colleagues from India, was repeatedly promised steak dinners if we were able to meet deadlines.
- duxup 7y agoI once traveled with a college who was socially a bit hard to handle. So we go out to the valley from the Midwest and he keeps suggesting we go to burger joints with the local team that is about %70 Indian. Everyone kept looking at me like "What the hell?".
- duxup 7y agoEr... colleague.
- hinkley 7y agoOne of the places I mentioned in another post did pizza on fridays as a teambuilding lunch thing. It would have been nice except it took us about two months to convince them to order a vegetarian pizza for our Indian coworkers. Didn't feel like teambuilding. But as I meet more and more people with food sensitivities I think that providing food for an event is just fraught anyway, and maybe you should try something else.
- duxup 7y agoThat's really weird, when done right, it isn't that hard to find a vegetarian or similar alternative. Most places that cater or just about any place have good options these days. At one place I worked we just used the same folks to bring in food. Rather than debate what they just had packages and we would check boxes (vegetarian, etc) and numbers and blamo reasonable food showed up. I think the real issue is when you have folks who don't know what they're doing trying to manage it.
- vibrato 7y agoWhat about a carnivore alternative? Not so cheap...
- duxup 7y agoAt a company I worked at it was bonus time. Bonuses had been a point of contention forever as the company always bugled the metrics and despite a lot of talk bonuses were hard to account for. So anyway they announce a "Christmas Bonus": $50.... I mean I'll take $50 but it felt like such an empty gesture. Just a few years earlier I had gotten $150 bonus while working at a pizza joint. The HR person who sent out the survey that year did not like that factoid about the pizza joint that I provided on their benefits feedback survey.
- xeromal 7y agoYeah, I got something similar to that. Make 6 figures and got a 200$ yearly bonus. I'd rather have no bonus. haha
- maxxxxx 7y agoOr when a team works 6 weekends in a row, give them 3 days extra off and make it sound generous.
- futureastronaut 7y agoI worked in a startup eng. org that worked everybody to the bone for several months with a dubious SOA overhaul. The prize was a cheap open bar. At least it looked like an open bar, privately reserved and such. We each got two raffle-style tickets to exchange for drinks, lest us peons get carried away. Three days off? That would've been amazing.
- Nelson69 7y agohahaha. "drink tickets" I don't honestly know if it's a cost thing so much as some trick HR has convinced people will limit their liability if something bad were to happen. Every time I see that done, it seems like there is a little black market for them the develops, some folks don't drink or leave the party early and people tend to accumulate more than their 2 or 3 tickets. This company no longer exists but they routinely demanded 6 days a week effort as a matter of principle (if you put the hard work in up front, it pays dividends as the project goes on... and then they just add stuff near the end of the project) Some people left, morale was terrible, what did they do? The C-level staff that a) had limited culinary ability, and b) nobody really wanted to spend time with made a special dinner for everybody, it was quasi mandatory on a Friday night. The CEO even gave a speech about how they could have just taken us to a nice restaurant but it felt more personal and special for them to make and serve us dinner. To make it even better, there were some vegans in the mix and they didn't have anything that they could eat.
- edoo 7y agoThis is almost as bad as the US government using taxpayer dollars to run covert social media campaigns to make everyone feel better about the government.
- jessaustin 7y agoWe're not meant to opine about black budget spending!
- Qub3d 7y agoCould have been worse. There was a time when corporations would literally pay to produce entire broadway productions about their companies. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_musical https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_musical
- pwodhouse 7y agoRemember "The Internship"?
- crooked-v 7y agoThe documentary Bathtubs Over Broadway suggests that those productions got positive reponses from employees, but that probably had to do with good production values (some of the shows cost more than actual Broadway runs) and it being an expenses-paid day trip for everybody.
- Qub3d 7y agoThat's actually where I learned about industrial musicals myself. I wanted to link a more direct explanation, however.
- IggleSniggle 7y agoThese still exist in the form of corporate newsletters filled with high-production videos of very serious people saying very serious things. It's still considered a musical, it's just you hafta have the right Dadaist frame of mind to get it.
- GoodJokes 7y agoThese are times when I remember that in a hierarchy people at the top are so removed and deluded that they think their employees aren’t full grown adults that see this bullshit for what it is. It is insulting actually.
- jchw 7y agoA certain startup I worked at, the CEO would give out... gift cards. Occasionally, usually after someone was severely overworked. And I’m pretty certain he got them for free/cheap in the first place. Of course, the real red flag was starting at $10/hr 1099’d (almost definitely illegally) and being told it’s more than most people start at. For software engineering. After a good interview. I was astounded and perplexed, but it was my first software job, I was a college dropout, and I was still living with my parents, so I took it anyways. But if I knew what I know now, just a few years later, I would’ve laughed in their faces. Oh well.
- cosmie 7y ago> the CEO would give out... gift cards. Occasionally, usually after someone was severely overworked. And I’m pretty certain he got them for free/cheap in the first place. I've been there, and it wasn't even a startup. The company credit cards had 1% back, redeemable as gift cards. The owner/CEO insisted on paying as many vendors and contracts as possible via credit card to rack up the points. The stack of gift cards (for places he didn't like enough to keep the cards) became the de-facto office "perk me up", particularly after bouts of excessive overwork.
- bluedino 7y agoI don't mind gift cards. It's a bit tacky when you can tell they are Christmas leftover by the eGiftCard that is included with it expering back in Feburary, and it's June.
- ravroid 7y agoWhen I first started out as a software dev for an agency, I was offered $9/hr. I took it because it was more than the minimum wage I was making at my restaurant job. After a few months they rewarded me for my hard work by giving me a raise of $1. At the time I was grateful but now I realize what an insult that was.
- Thiez 7y agoA wage increase of over 10% every few months doesn't sound so bad. I don't suppose it was a regular thing?
- lazyasciiart 7y agoMy younger sister received an award for being a promising new grad or something in her first year at one of the Big 4 accounting companies. Her prize? A public ceremony where a senior manager handed her a copy of 50 Shades of Grey.......
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- mabbo 7y ago... had they read the book? Or just heard it was popular? I'm trying to mentally justify how this isn't the craziest, stupidest idea ever.
- 1121redblackgo 7y agoIf I really stretched my imagination, maybe 'She's worked so hard and did so well for our company, maybe she deserves to take a nice vacation, here's the most popular book for women to symbolize that'.
- mc32 7y agoSo ten years ago it would have been “the sisterhood of the traveling pants.”
- protomyth 7y agoYou are putting a bit too much thought into the decision making. I figure someone walked into the book store and picked the book from the first bestseller display. Never attribute to malice or ignorance what can adequately explained by lazy.
- eli 7y agoIt is very common for abusive people to exploit this attitude and commit acts that are clearly over the line but have some barely plausible innocent explanation. Gaslighting the victim is, perhaps, another intentional part of the abuse. You'd have to work pretty hard to convince me that gifting a young woman a sexually explicit novel is not malicious.
- _jal 7y agoIncidentally, this is also why philanthropy is not a substitute for a safety net.
- bazooka_penguin 7y agoDont tech companies in china hire full time cheerleaders for their male programmers?
- anc84 7y agoI heard they did that in Texas.
- AdmiralAsshat 7y agoI read this and was immediately reminded of David Sedaris' short story about working as a Macy's Elf: >I spend all day lying to people, saying, "You look so pretty," and "Santa can't wait to visit with you. You're all he talks about. It's just not Christmas without you. You're Santa's favorite person in the entire tri-state area." > >Sometimes I lay it on really thick. "Aren't you the princess of Rongovia? Santa said that a beautiful princess was coming to visit him. He said she would be wearing a red dress and that she was very pretty, but not stuck up or two-faced. That's you isn't it?" I lay it on and the parents mouth the words, "Thank you," and "Good job." Source: https://www.thisamericanlife.org/47/transcript https://www.thisamericanlife.org/47/transcript
- itronitron 7y agoI particularly liked Sedaris' rendition of 'Away in a Manger' sung straight from the heart.
- mooseburger 7y agoThis sounds kinda nice. Certainly better than a sandwich, or a lunch. You have to give it points for originality at least.
- magashna 7y agoI got an XXL Berkshire Hathaway shirt. I'm a medium. Thanks
- failrate 7y agoDid you even work for Berkshire Hathaway? Lie to me, and tell me you worked for Citibank: it makes the story even better.
- Scoundreller 7y agoThey may have gotten a BH T-Shirt even though they worked for somebody else.
- grimjack00 7y agoAt least you could wear it; I am a XXL (tall), and I've only received a proper sized shirt twice in the last twenty years.
- mcguire 7y agoIBM: I was to be sent at short notice to the International Broadcasting Convention in Amsterdam. They wanted every one to wear a "uniform": black pants and an IBM shirt. My manager said they'd get me button-down shirts, but at the meeting where they distributed the shirts, no button-downs were to be found. They'd mysteriously disappeared. They had to scrounge me up some XXL polo shirts.
- draw_down 7y agoCertainly bizarre, but pretty harmless I think. I could certainly think of worse.
- ThinkBeat 7y agoI worked at one of those companies that earned ridiculous money refinancing peoples homes during the run-up to the financial crisis. (Yes, I now know it was quite unethical) They had a boiler room team of salespeople who made an insane amount of money. We are talking six figures a month. They were not at all highly skilled or had any financial background or degree. Their bonuses could be a luxury car. (or once a horse). I worked on the IT side. We made the software that basically did all the work. It included instructions of a spiel to sell loans, how to get around various excuses and such. And it did all the work with filing the required paperwork ensuring all the required information was there, sending out information to the people who refinanced all that crap. You could, in practice, take someone from the street, set them up with this software and they could sell loans. (this is not as far fetched as it may sound). I have so many stories about my time there but anyways, the IT team was not at all highly paid, nor very appreciated. One Christmas we knew we were getting a bonus, and given what we knew about bonuses being handed out we were kinda excited. Wanna guess what it was? A $50 gift card for a ham.
- radcon 7y ago> A $50 gift card for a ham. Sounds like they were a little too inspired by National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation. I guess the Jelly of the Month Club was all sold out though.
- lttlrck 7y agoThanks! now I feel better about my $50 Amazon Gift card...
- WorldMaker 7y agoThere's something about that particular (shady) business model of ethically questionable work that over-values "commission activity" and under-values technical achievement that makes it possible. A past employer used the software we built to create a commissions lottery [1] for a call center floor, and paid huge commissions to an "R&D team" that "value added", but really just created idiotic Access reports from the software's databases (sometimes bringing the Production databases to their knees until we started forcing them to use clones and BI data lakes), but software development was a "cost center" ineligible for commissions, despite doing all the "real" work (including any and all efficiency gains). At one point the executives convinced themselves despite huge turnover that they were somehow magically hiring "better" call center staff. I feel somewhat confident that that companies misplaced ideas of work/efficiency/how it was profitable were directly correlated with its misplaced sense of ethics. The "R&D team", for instance, seemed representative of the sort of bottom feeder scum that play political games well but don't actually have any skills of their own, and arguably at the end of the day that was roughly what the company as a whole was, a bottom feeder parasite playing politics well enough to make a ton of money surviving in an ethically dubious evolutionary niche. [1] We had proof that it was a really bad lottery, too. The software was something like 95%+ accurate in how much money was likely associated with each item that went out to the call center. To make things "fair" we kept getting a lot of feedback to make it as "random" as possible.
- StavrosK 7y agoWe need to find a name for a gesture so small in its generosity that it ends up being offensive. No bonus would have left me disappointed, but a $50 bonus would have made me angry. Like when Delta gave a food voucher to make up for a 5-hour delay on a 30-minute file. The voucher was for $3. Fuck Delta.
- pavel_lishin 7y agoWhen my entire engineering team was laid off, work organized farewell drinks for us. Except they didn't actually budget for this. Their idea was that the whole office would go out and... celebrate? Us being laid off? And pay for it ourselves?
- StavrosK 7y agoSo they basically told you "you're fired, go to a bar"? Jesus, people...
- pavel_lishin 7y ago"Go enjoy a round of drinks with all the people you don't work with anymore."
- FireBeyond 7y agoWhen something similar happened to me in the first dotcom crash, my boss at least had the decency to say "screw it, I'm putting it on my company AmEx", and even when he went home, he told the bartender "Keep it open all night, and add a 25% tip" and told us to stay as long as we wanted. We did.
- JakeStone 7y agoKudos to him.
- JakeStone 7y agoMan, when my company got shut down in the dot com days, after the 10am all hands, I said screw it and took my entire team out for drinks until about 4, out of my own pocket. As far as I'm concerned, that's the way you do it if you're going down with the ship. Drink with the crew, pay for them, and tell stories and try to make plans as you slip into the waters. 19 years later, I'm still friends with all but one who disappeared to the offline somehow. Ended up giving my director a slightly embarrassing hug when we got back in, but we'd been through enough over the past that she forgave me and we're still friends.
- radcon 7y agoI worked for a company that was always handing out cheap tokens of their "appreciation" (we all knew they didn't appreciate the employees but I guess they figured pretending might reduce turnover). Sometimes it was a free pretzel or water ice, other times it was a Thank You email that sounded like it was written by some cheap marketing AI. You could also get a "Shout Out" in the monthly newsletter that nobody read, but only if you twisted your coworkers' arms enough to submit one. In the end, all their efforts only served as constant reminders of how little the executives actually appreciated everyone, which decreased morale and increased turnover. There's something extra depressing about working for a company where the millionaire executives think workers can be placated with 25-cent junk food. I think that company is still limping along somehow, which is great because the new Glassdoor reviews are usually pretty amusing. Also, if you want to see an example of morale boosting gone wrong the Healthineers song is pretty great: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K5LiUrezV6k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K5LiUrezV6k
- bluedino 7y agoHere's my story: A place I worked at one time had the vending machines removed. The owner's neice was overweight and died of cancer and had other health issues, so he didn't want any of the rest of us making poor deciisions and ending up like her So they took the vending machines out. Great, now we need to go to the gas station a block down the road to get a candy bar, chips, or afternoon soda. One particularly hot day, the sales team went out to the production floor/warehouse to hand out Powerade (generic gatorade) to the workers. They brought the social media and marketing people with them to take photos and post the 'good deed ' online. We can only have a soft drink when they deem it necessary!
- maxxxxx 7y agoThere was a story about Steve Jobs seeing an overweight engineer in the hallway eating a donut. He glared at him and next day there were no donuts in the Apple cafeteria. I don't remember where I read this.
- arkades 7y agoWas at a place that did something similar, but at least they replaced it with free (if crappy) coffee and giant bowls of fruit. I actually appreciated it, even if it was a touch “we want to pay lower Health insurance premiums” paternalistic.
- lostphilosopher 7y agoNot a counter point to this article, but a counter point to the efficacy of monetary rewards. > "Study showed that monetary incentives are great for routine, mechanical work. But how does it play when talking about cognitive, advanced tasks? Not well at all." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dgKKPQiRRag https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dgKKPQiRRag Counter-counter point: If anyone ever points you to this for evidence _you_ shouldn't get a bonus/monetary reward system, ask if _they_ get a bonus/monetary reward system...
- balfirevic 7y agoMaybe they will respond that management is basically routine, mechanical work ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- lostphilosopher 7y ago> "Every day was a hot new idea and yesterday’s priority was forgotten. Why bother making progress towards a goal that will change tomorrow?" ("Rob's" comment on the OP's article) This to me is the single biggest killer of motivation / productivity. If you've got this problem, I agree with the video that even large monetary rewards won't salvage productivity.
- brokenmachine 7y agoI agree that is bad, but what about a bureaucracy where everything is so convoluted that you can never get any idea off the ground?
- Someone1234 7y agoThis is a different topic than the article and the discussion so far. A yearly bonus or a "thank you"/party/etc aren't rewards tied to specific tasks. They're meant to be gestures of appropriation. You're discussing a bonus structure that ties financial incentives to very specific work items, and rewards them accordingly. I'm not disagreeing with your point, just pointing out they're two different topics.
- 7y ago
- AnimalMuppet 7y agoWhen I bring home a new T shirt from work, my wife says, "Morale's bad again, huh"?
- Someone1234 7y agoConsidering how expensive staff are, I've never understood the culture surrounding penny pinching the stuff that would keep them happy/improve moral/improve retention. Forget the moral arguments for a second, even in purely financial terms it would likely pay for itself in recruitment savings alone, let alone brain drain/efficiency, training costs, and so on. Even a "cheap" employee in a white collar job, is likely costing $60K or more (inc. the employer's share of taxes, benefits, etc). 1% of that is only $600. But people won't pay even that towards bonuses/comfortable chairs/second monitors/"thank you" lunches/staff parties. At some point it seems a lot less to do with what is rational/logical, and more to do with the power dynamics and people higher up the chain's apathy. Companies are actually hurting themselves for seemingly no good reason. It isn't even fiscally responsible.
- duxup 7y agoI'm with you, with all the costs a bonus seems like a pretty arbitrary place to make the call to be cheap. In the situation I was in there were some penny punchers who felt quite proud of saving a couple hundred bucks here or there and couldn't see the forest through the trees of the misc expenses they were "saving". It was really just poor management.
- mevile 7y agoIt must be hard to quantify the benefits of preventive measures to reduce employee turnover. It would probably take a company that had all of its shit in order to have a nice report about how HR initiatives over some amount of years was directly correlated to lower employee turnover. If you can't put it in a report to accurately understand the impact of the expenditure it probably becomes hard to justify. I think this must explain all the ineffective half measures and low budgets.
- bobochan 7y agoI work in the US and since the Great Recession the swag that we used to get around the office (e.g. t-shirts, ice cream days) have really dried up. Spending on buildings, on the other hand, has increased rapidly. Last year I went to a meeting in France that was held in a rather old building in Grenoble. It was a day long meeting so they brought in a boxed lunch for everyone. Shocking. There was some sushi, chicken in pasta, hot rolls, chocolate cake, and two small bottles of wine and water. It was fantastic. I was slow on the uptake, but then it hit me, given a choice between spending money on people or things, they chose to spend it on people. Honestly, a total shock for me.
- bori5 7y ago"Many years ago, when I was very young and you were even younger...Grinding through emails" Dude you're still young!
- xtracto 7y agoMy same thought... I understand email is "old" in terms of technology speed but man SMTP was just defined in 1982.
- tzakrajs 7y agoChristmas 2010, HostGator gave everyone an e-cigarette or some other option but since we were mostly 20-somethings working there the vast majority chose the e-cigarette.
- bluedino 7y agoI bet the next week was glorious if everyone smoked them at their desks
- tzakrajs 7y agoIt was, there are probably some videos of us double, or triple barreling them and blowing clouds everywhere. My throat still hurts thinking about that day.
- Scoundreller 7y agoFor 2010, that’s pretty ahead of the curve. Did they give you a couple Bitcoin in 2011?
- 7402 7y agoAt the end of a project death-march (at one point I turned in a >100 hour timecard), the division director had a celebratory thank-you dinner for all the managers involved in the project. My direct supervisor was at first puzzled as to why I wasn't coming with him to the dinner at the end of the day, and then he was quite appalled - I think he later had words with the director about the whole thing.
- hinkley 7y agoI'd bet money that most of those managers weren't even in the building for most of that death march. I have a standing rule. If I work overtime it's because I fucked up. I said something would be done by Friday but I goofed off, I'll work. If I'm working nights and weekends for business reasons, then my manager is in the building the entire time. A lot of them tone down their rhetoric when you make them put skin in the game. All of a sudden some of the scope gets negotiated down.
- BonesJustice 7y agoI have the same rule. If I’m expected to come in on the weekend, my manager had better be there. If it’s important enough to ask me to sacrifice my personal time, then it had better be important enough for him to be there too. Unless it’s because I screwed up and need to fix something post haste. In which case, he won’t have to ask me at all.
- lamby 7y agoYou could even passive-aggressively frame it as "oh, but you being around would be highly motivating..."
- tonyarkles 7y agoIt’s funny to tell this story in a thread about bad incentives, but the “managers not there” part reminded me of it. I worked at a startup that did citizen identity management for government (think SSO for an entire province). Because of gov’t IT policies, we often had to deploy after hours, in a kind of weird “managed IT” process. We still automated the process, but couldn’t press the button without being on a conference call etc. Anyway, we had a deployment go south on Friday night, rolled it back, and decided to come back and try again Sunday. The CEO himself showed up about 10 minutes after we did with a big box of Dilly Bars. Normally that would put this in the category of this thread: “thanks, I’m working overtime for ice cream...” but what he said made it all better: “I know this sucks to be here today. Help yourselves to ice cream. And I’ll be in my office all day, stop by if you need anything. And please let me know when you’re done so I know I can go home.” Awesome awesome dude.
- GlenTheMachine 7y agoMy employer, a US DoD component, had a program called “On The Spot” awards. The idea was that if you had done something outstanding, your first line supervisor could authorize an immediate bonus of up to $1000. Being the DoD, it couldn’t be that simple. They decided that actually the bonuses had to be approved by your second, third, and fourth line supervisors. And also by the program manager at the sponsoring agency. Forms had to be filled out, lost, found, signed, routed, xeroxed, left on desks while people were on vacation. Passed through legal and security. Also, the bonus was distributed among all the team members being rewarded. The $1000 figure was the maximum allowed for the total bonus, not the individual bonuses. My team did something outstanding. It took 18 months of hard labor. Overtime. High stakes demonstrations. We ended up bringing in tens of millions of dollars in funding. A full year later an extra $150 showed up in my paycheck. PS I forgot another incident. I was nominated for a prestigious award, given by an official very high up at the Pentagon. I was asked to write my own nomination letter. I was given the award; to receive it I had to dress up in a suit, show up early to work, shake the official’s hand, and then spend an hour giving him a tour. The actual award was a letter of commendation and a challenge coin. There was no bonus. Theoretically, the challenge coin would be worth a lifetime of free drinks in bars frequented by military members. Or so I’m told. I don’t drink.
- awestley 7y agoOuch. A slap in the face to you and they might as well have burnt that $150 (Likely $300 dollars before taxes) since it had the total opposite effect.
- quintushoratius 7y ago> Likely $300 dollars before taxes The net bonus was probably $150 before tax; it's a rare employer that pays the tax for you.
- awestley 7y agoNet by definition means after certain adjustments have been taken out (like taxes). Regardless $75/$150/$300 in any case, it's a slap in the face. A slap that you need to pay taxes on.
- nostalgk 7y agoCurrently working at a place, taking a significantly lower pay, just for the morale around here. Last place I worked didn't even have free coffee, and it was a Fortune 100 company. I'll take the coffee and ability to put my feet up, thanks.
- empath75 7y agoI spent 2 weeks basically carrying our team building a proof of concept for a $10 million contract, working 60+ hours a week, and got a $25 gift card for applebees.
- C14L 7y agoPlus, of course, the payment for the overtime hours, I guess?
- gameswithgo 7y agoNot sure if that is worse than a challenge coin. Maybe.
- egypturnash 7y agoA lifetime chance at free drinks from military people (and hangers-on of military culture) vs a meal at Applebees. On the one hand you have to spend time in the company of military folks. On the other hand you have to go to Applebees. Damn that's a hard one to call. I think I'd prefer the coin, at least it's shiny.
- kevinlou 7y agoThis is infinitely worse than a challenge coin.
- mcguire 7y agoSo, several years ago, I was working for SAIC on a government contract. This was shortly before the SAIC/Leidos split. Our head-honcho was an otherwise decent man, but SAIC HQ decided...something. I've no idea what they thought they were doing. What happened was that the daughter or niece of one of SAIC's original founders came in as the co-head-honcho. No one liked her, although no one particularly disliked her. No one knew what she did. She would show up at meetings, be irrelevant, and disappear again. The customers were very confused. Shortly before Christmas, she and one of the administrative assistant types went around the office with a cart, giving out name plates. She had to ask who everyone was. Then she expressed how valuable you were and how you were doing a wonderful job. She eventually disappeared again, back to wherever she came from, very shortly before the SAIC/Leidos split. I still have no idea what the hell was going on. And I worked at IBM for several years.
- pwodhouse 7y agoJohn Oliver did a segment explaining how Murray Coal gave people bonus checks as low as $3 for dodging safety policies to mine more coal, and said "they can void their checks if they don't want the bonuses". Some miners mailed the checks back voided with "Eat Shit Bob Murray" on them.
- nefitty 7y agoMurray is possibly one of the most infuriating contemporary figures I've ever learned about: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_E._Murray https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_E._Murray After one of his mines collapsed: > The MSHA report heavily criticized Bob Murray's volatile behavior during the crisis, especially at daily briefings for family members, where he "frequently became very irate and would start yelling," even making young children cry, it said. He told family members that "the media is telling you lies" and "the union is your enemy." http://www.nbcnews.com/id/26050043/ns/us_news-life/t/year-after-mine-collapse-many-failures-clear/ http://www.nbcnews.com/id/26050043/ns/us_news-life/t/year-af...
- sigstoat 7y ago* got a $6 christmas bonus one year. (they did a percentage across that board, and i was working very little.) * coupon for $10 off a turkey on more than one occasion * enormous bowl of candy left out for everyone to get fat on. when employees complained that we didn't appreciate a constant supply of candy, CEO whined about how he was giving us "free food" and we were complaining. * two different employers have decided that they needed to paint a bunch of fancy accent walls. they then get budget painters to put a single sloppy coat of cheap paint over the professionally painted office-wall-grey. ends up looking pitiful.
- dash2 7y agoThis reminds me of the story in Rivethead about Howie Makem, the Quality Cat at General Motors, a 5' 9" cat who would wander the shop floor encouraging quality. One day the order came down that Howie Makem was not to appear in public without his head on. The working stiffs figured out the reason: otherwise, they might realise he wasn't actually a cat.
- butterfi 7y agoI once worked for a very high profile entertainment company. Every year, the CEO would give a "company gift" that was usually somewhat underwhelming. A blanket with the company logo. A workout bag with the company logo. An umbrella, with the company logo. Clearly someone was shopping out of the "stuff we can get our logo on" catalog. The year after I left a new CEO was hired (who, arguably had more experience in this particular industry) and they promptly said "oh hell no" to that practice, and gave everybody new iPhones and iPads. Dang.... figures it happen just after I left...
- the_common_man 7y agoThe CEO? butterfi Sorry, couldn't resist :-)
- cptskippy 7y agoI worked on a team of three people in the early 2000s to develop one of the first web based automotive insurance underwriting applications for an insurance broker. It was a low volume program and as such they hired a single marketing representative to cover the entire state of Pennsylvania. He worked on commission and was expected to make in the high five figures. It ended up being wildly more successful than anticipated and pulled in double digit millions the first year. The marketing representative's commission ended up being middle six figures as a result. He sent us a case of Tastykake snack cakes as thanks. That was all we got in the way of thanks from the company.
- woah 7y agoWas it really his responsibility to give your team a lavish thanks? Sounds like he had a windfall, but working on commission can very easily go the opposite direction. Was the wild success of the initiative due to your team’s outstanding technical genius?
- falsedan 7y agoI believe that, without anyone to implement the system, it would have made zero dollars.
- perl4ever 7y ago"Sounds like he had a windfall, but working on commission can very easily go the opposite direction" Well, I'm a bit skeptical. Someone who makes $500K unexpectedly isn't going to lose $500K unexpectedly.
- StavrosK 7y agoOne year you sell $500k worth of software to customers, the next customers sell $500k worth of software to you. Easy come, easy go, it's a zero-sum game.
- cptskippy 7y agoIt wasn't his responsibility to reward us, and he gave us the gift pretty soon after the program's launch as thanks for the support we gave him and his top producer. I wasn't admonishing him, he was a genuinely nice guy. I only mentioned his fortune to give perspective on how profitable the program was. A producer at this broker made just over $50k on commission if they busted ass. This program was so successful that he made close to half a million. I mentioned his gift not because it was shitty but because it was the only form of thanks or acknowledgement we received. It was actually a great gift at the time because we're located in Little Debbie country and didn't even know what Tastykake was. It contextualize so much pop culture (e.g. Clerks).
- ConfusedDog 7y agoKudos session during the Agile's Sprint Retrospective. Everyone suppose to show their appreciation to teammates of their choices for a mandatory pat on the back. I always feel being forced to do that is really awkward. For one, if someone didn't get at least one pat on the back, it is very demoralizing for them. Also, there are a lot of teammates did not get a pat by the persons they think should be gratuitous would be a little resentful. I think it's one of the dumbest morale boosting activities.
- 4ntonius8lock 7y agoI once worked for a company that was on the verge of bankruptcy. The owner (main shareholder) of the company decided that what the company needed was a new CEO to turn the ship around. At the time, the company was so broke that we were getting less than the needed amount of office supplies. At the end of each month, basics were missing. So us, the employees, were bringing in our own toilet paper, coffee, cleaning materials, etc. The new CEO came in at the end of the month when everything was missing. He felt were were 'gloomy'. So he went out and bought us all balloons and something else I forgot by now. But the feeling of going to my desk to pick up toilet paper that I had to bring in while carrying a 'free balloon' with some 'motivating' words is something that I will carry forever. It was part of my motivation to spent 8 years self employed.
- brianpgordon 7y agoIsn't providing insufficient restroom facilities an OSHA violation?
- 4ntonius8lock 7y agoIt wasn't in the US. I'm sure it was a violation of some code in that country, but if the company is close to bankruptcy... you can't bleed a rock. The only way for the remaining employees to see what was owed to them was for the company to keep sputtering on.
- fatnoah 7y agoOh, man, don't get me started. Two short ones: I did a stint in professional services and billed for 2600 hours @ $250/hr for a total of $650k. Essentially worked 12+ hour days for a year, and got a bonus of $1000 before taxes. I quit within a month. Next up was an appreciation gesture where we were thanked for all of our extra hard work with a pack of "Extra" gum and a delivery of baked potatoes (with all the fixings, at least). Unfortunately, the potatoes didn't arrive until about 2pm and no announcement was made. There was just a couple tins in the corner of the kitchen.
- rsweeney21 7y agoMost of the developers at my company (www.facetdev.com) are contract, but for the few full-timers we still have, we used to ask the team to work long hours out of the goodness of their hearts if a project needed it. That seemed wrong, so I implemented a bonus plan where you get paid 60% of everything you bill over your weekly goals and made working extra hours optional. I love writing those bonus checks!
- StavrosK 7y agoWait, so you pay overtime, except you pay 40% less? I must be misunderstanding. Also please tell me you aren't proud of paying for overtime and I'm misunderstanding that too. That should be the minimum expectation.
- dhruvmittal 7y agoNot the original poster, but any kind of overtime is rare for salaried work? At least in the US. I'd take 60% per hour for overtime in a heartbeat as long as it was optional, since I've always ended up doing that kind of work for client/manager goodwill (or the pleasure of not being fired).
- chatmasta 7y agoSome states (Washington, IIRC?) require overtime hours be tracked even for salaried positions, and those hours should be 1.5x regular rate. (This is off the top of my head based on an internship 6 years ago)
- gameswithgo 7y agoI worked for a while for Thomson Reuters, where some years ago somebody in charge read that companies with value statements performed better than those that did not. So they hired a 3rd party consultant to write down their values and they had these posted all over the walls. They also had posters of stuff like "the mood elevator" pasted up in the kitchen: https://themoodelevator.com/ https://themoodelevator.com/ Everyone I felt like I could talk to about this thought this was childish, idiotic nonsense. Do companies have thousands of childish people who take this stuff seriously and think it is great? Or does everyone have to just pretend because they don't want to get fired? I have a hard time understanding it. Anyway I left that place.
- deogeo 7y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emperor's_New_Clothes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emperor's_New_Clothes
- orclev 7y agoIt's a problem of delegation. Some executive "reads" some whitepaper (I.E. gets told about offhandedly by their buddy at the golf course), and thinks that it sounds like a great way to prove their "doing something" about moral or diversity or whatever. They then turn around and tell someone under them to "make it so", who does a tiny bit of research and then passes that off to someone under them. Eventually this arrives at someone with a clue who actually does some research and figures out this is an idiotic idea, but at that point you'd basically be telling your bosses bosses boss that he's a moron, so instead you just play along, get it done, and hope everyone forgets about it in a couple months.
- radcon 7y ago> So they hired a 3rd party consultant to write down their values and they had these posted all over the walls. My previous employer did something similar with a word they invented -- except it was really just a synonym for efficiency. The CFO got so excited that he had a bunch of posters printed out and handed out smaller versions to the supervisors. The supervisors all thought it was embarrassing but none of them had the guts to say that to the CFO. To this day they still list that fake word in all their job postings with a little blurb about what it means, completely unaware that most applicants will probably spit their coffee out laughing at the absurdity of it. I think it might even have its own page on their website too...
- vinceguidry 7y agoOne of my hobbies is to dream up fun ways to shame the higher ups. The basic gist of it is that you have to thread a needle between the fiction that you as an employee care about the business and the business cares about the employees and the reality that the business primarily cares about increasing profits and the employees just don't want to be bothered by silly management tactics. So in order to be successful at this and deliver maximum shame you have to pay the same amount of lip service to the fiction as management does while savagely illustrating the reality. And do it as publicly as possible, but not in a town hall or all-hands meeting. All-hands meetings are ridiculously expensive from the corporate perspective so derailing them to make a point makes you out to be a villain. At least wait until they ask for questions. But if the boss gets up and grabs everyone's attention for a minute, that's the perfect time to go on the warpath. "So what are we going to get for all this effort? Gift certificate to Applebees?" especially if that's something that's been done before. The idea here is that the boss is making an appeal to sacrifice personal comfort for the good of the company. That's never okay and is poor management. So raise the question of what we're getting in return. The payoff is twofold. First everyone paying attention gets the pleasure of watching the boss squirm. Second is the eventual pavlovian conditioning that gets the boss to respect the workers by not making unreasonable demands just because nobody will stand up to them. They need to justify it with more than hoorahs. The best part of it I think is if you do this once and get away with it, you won't see it again for awhile, then when they do and you have to remind them again, you can watch that flash of 'oh right, I can't do that with Vince around' on their face. Won't work in the public sector where the expectation to sacrifice yourself for the public good is intrinsic to the culture. But I consider carrying the torch for workplace respect part of what I consider "managing up" and one of the things I try to bring to every role.
- Balgair 7y agohttps://www.ribbonfarm.com/the-gervais-principle/ https://www.ribbonfarm.com/the-gervais-principle/
- fj39dkf 7y agoI'm surprised this seems to work so well for you. I've had colleagues do similar things and it pretty much always resulted in them being "managed out", outright fired, or mysteriously lumped into a round of layoffs that otherwise didn't affect their department.
- fooblitzky 7y agoThe worst morale boosting gesture I've ever experienced was the CEO telling an all-staff meeting that anyone that wasn't happy to work there could get $2000 for quitting on the spot.
- joezydeco 7y agoBezos?
- fooblitzky 7y agoNo - small 50 person company.
- mcguire 7y agoOnce as a co-op for IBM, our manager at the weekly described a severance package. I immediately tried to take it. At a later meeting, when the package was modified, he started out with, "mcguire, you are not eligible."
- ok_coo 7y agoHow many people took it? I'd probably take it on the spot. I mean, if morale is that bad already it's like you're getting a bonus for leaving. Might as well!
- fooblitzky 7y agoI don't think anyone did - it was ambiguous whether it would invalidate the notice period (4 weeks), which would have been a bit more than $2000. No-one was prepared to risk it.
- ravenstine 7y agoI worked at a company that handed out monthly "awards" to one member of every team, but it was clear that winners of these awards were picked out of a hat and everyone knew it. One guy on my team got an "outstanding excellence" award the week after getting chewed out by the CEO for not pulling his own weight(which was totally untrue).
- throwaway2413 7y agoMy own personal favorite, from my GM, explaining why the sales team was getting six-figure bonuses for an extremely successful year entirely driven by engineering, which was getting barely four figures: “Sales people are motivated by money; engineers are motivated by fun work. So just do your job and have fun!” I’m not even interested in money, just a little respect would’ve been great! Needless to say, I quit shortly thereafter.
- hinkley 7y agoOne place handed out awards to half a dozen of us but the ceremony and the gift were not given at the same time. We had to harangue them for 6 weeks before they gave us the damned thing and by that point the fact that we had to work for it a second time completely undermined the thoughtfulness of the original idea. And earlier boss would come to us at 10 am on Friday and said we could leave early if we finished up early. The third time he did this we all shot daggers at him and there was no fourth time. Because every time he did this we ended up staying late on Friday instead of leaving early. This is the same guy who argued my estimates for a project down by 50% and then the project took 3x as long as he told the customer (if you don't have time to do it right you have time to do it over). But that's a different story. It's important not to offer an award that you are not 100% sure you can follow through on. It's way worse than nothing. It's Lucy and the fucking football.
- devchix 7y agoI read this thread with such a jaundiced eye; from blunt cluelessness to outright cruelty - who is on the other side of these transactions? Surely these are humans who think about the things they (do to|inflict on) their underlings? Surely they are surrounded by other humans of moderate good sense who could see the harmful, if unintended consequence and talk them out of it? And yet, here we are. My contribution: office Christmas party. One drink ticket. Spouse or significant other specifically, emphatically, disinvited.
- mejarc 7y agoThe setting: a mandatory, in-person all-hands meeting at a medium-sized enterprise software company in SV. The time: a few weeks before the winter holidays, mid-2000s. What we expected: to hear about our company's IPO or beneficial acquisition. What we got: orders to design and construct crazy! wacky!! zany!!! miniature golf obstacles in the office for the CxOs to play through. I doubt the (unquantified) morale at this company improved.
- szbalint 7y agoTen euros worth of Amazon gift cards as birthday gift from the company. That amount has a great way of signaling that the company is too cheap to do anything real, but too unsophisticated to realize they then should have just given a slice of cake or a birthday card.
- russh 7y agoMy wife is a registered nurse and the facility she works for had a Christmas party "to recognize all the hard work" everyone did. At some point they did a raffle and handed out a total of 8 gift cards among the 200 employees at the party. Whatever. Her next pay stub had a deduction for $35 to cover the cost of that party and the "gifts" that were given.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- bitL 7y agoI remember one young aspiring manager (now director at Google) destroying a new talented employee by completely disregarding their work (which was the main component of their brand new successful system and helped said manager to a promotion), then later requesting that very same employee to smile more and be as energetic/optimistic as when they first walked into the office. Beatings will continue until morale improves...
- president 7y agoThis is the what happens when you hire engineers with zero emotional intelligence and/or communication skills just because they can pass a Leetcode interview and then promote them to a leadership position later down the line. I've seen this happen way too many times.
- gameswithgo 7y agohe was talking about an aspiring manager and here you assume he passed a leetcode interview. ive never known an autism spectrum leetcoder type to tell someone to smile more.
- bitL 7y agoHe was a tech lead and got promoted to manager after the release of that new system, the core of which was written by the mistreated developer. I think it had to do with dark personality traits instead of autism/Asperger.
- epage 7y agoThis reminds me of an internship. During my midterm review, my manager confessed to the org always giving interns terrible projects, the ones no one wanted to do, and later in the meeting procedes to dock me for not being enthusiastic enough about my project. For my final review, I got high marks without changing a thing.
- bitL 7y agoHard to beat this one: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/formulaone/article-5871773/McLaren-F1-staff-revolt-25p-chocolate-bars-given-reward-hard-work.html https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/formulaone/article-5871773...
- kej 7y agoMy dad worked Saturdays at a store related to his hobby, mostly for the employee discount. They did a holiday bonus as a percentage of yearly pay, and with his limited hours it came to something like $15. It became a running joke until a year or two later when I had my first software development job. The holidays came around, and we all got a letter saying how vital we were to the organization's financial success this year, and to express their appreciation they included a copy of the year's final pay stub. I had another job where I worked remotely, and they sent out employee recognition packages that were just office supplies with the company logo. The icing on top was that they had insufficient postage and I had to pay for a lousy pen.
- cleetus 7y agoI worked for a retail clothing company called Steve & Barry's which was very much like The Office. One year the bonus was a novelty 5 pound Hershey chocolate bar. I ended up with 20 pounds of chocolate because several people in my department had no idea what to do with them. Another year they gave Miracle on 34th Street DVDs and popcorn because earlier that year we opened a location on 34th St in Manhattan. There were no bonuses my third year because the company filed bankruptcy and downsized. At company-wide meetings, stand out performers were given 'top-banana' awards, which if I'm remembering correctly were actually bananas. I think one of my buddies actually kept his on his desk and let it rot until some poor cleaning person threw it away. The company would order pizzas for lunch to encourage people not to go out, but charged a dollar a slice. Leftover pizza was wrapped individually in tinfoil, frozen, and available for sale the next day, still for a dollar. I remember several rounds of company wide emails chastising people for not paying for frozen pizza. Shortly after that first bankruptcy filing, the company filed again and liquidated. Steve and Barry were bought out after the first filing and will never have to work again.
- function_seven 7y agoOh God I forgot about that place. I went there once after hearing about the hype from a coworker ("Dude, great selection and cheap as hell!"). The place was miserable. Dirty clothing strewn all over the place. I bought a couple shirts for like $8 each. Neither of them fit all that well. They disintegrated after one wash. One was cut crooked. Seems like the whole company was a thin (and I mean thin) quick fashion veneer over sweatshop labor?
- hackerbabz 7y agoSweatshops can do a good job though. They must have have used particularly poor workers for some reason.
- datashaman 7y agoPoor workers. For some reason. ISWYDT.
- niccl 7y agoA different view: I'm a contract dev at a very small company (20 all up, 2.5 devs, all contractors). The bosses are owners, and work _crazy_ hours. Occasionally they'll give out $100 supermarket vouchers, with a hand-written Thank You message, when we've hit some milestone. It's worth barely more than an hour's work, but I still appreciate it. I'm pretty well paid there, and to give a cash bonus that would be significant on top would be a big dent for them, so I mentally fall back on the 'It's the thought that counts', and the hand-written cards give a genuine feeling of being appreciated
- crooked-v 7y agoI'm sure it helps that it's actually something useful, unlike some of the other examples given in the comments - everyone needs groceries, after all.
- falsedan 7y agoOne job presented me with a Kindle after passing probation, it was still in the box so straight into eBay to get money for something I actually wanted. Same place rewarded a risky project we completed blazingly fast (the new VP, when reviewing it, said it looked good for three quarters of work and we had to correct him to say we’d started 3 months ago) with an Italian meal and a promotion for the lead dev. The rest of us were on pitiful salaries and all but one quit in the next three months. Makes me appreciate the current role more, which has 4 office events a year, a kids Christmas party where the parent-provided presents are reimbursed, and a standard formula for a leaving drinks budget (roughly enough for one drink per employee per year of employment). People still talk about when a 5- and 7-year veteran both finished up in the same week.
- steve_taylor 7y agoThis level of bullshit has PWC written all over it.
- beezlebubba 7y agoI worked for a "huge well-known bank" as a data center engineer. Unfortunately, they had converted all the FTE positions to contractor. As a contractor, you had as much job security as a slab of meat. All new contractor hires were given a copy of "Who Moved My Cheese" to read. In 32 years of working, I've never seen a place with a higher turnover rate. It was sad because the job itself was pretty nice, just nothing else about it was.
- arkades 7y agoI’ve got two from the hospital: After a couple of trainees in our area committed suicide, there was a cry and a hue about attending to trainee mental health. Our hospital took this to heart, and decided: they’d hold a resident mental health day! This took the form of an iced cream party for the residents. Specifically, it meant they got some tri-flavor cartons of iced cream and stuck them in the physicians lounge. They did not give the residents any protected time to take a shit, much less go down to the physicians lounge for iced cream. None of the residents got any, and the attendings ended up eating it. They subsequently sent out an email patting themselves on the back for the efforts they were making to keep any more residents from jumping off the fucking roof. Another time: it was physician day. I hadn’t actually seen this before, most hospitals don’t bother praising physicians, but this was a safety net hospital with shit salaries. The trainees on the psych floor were encouraged to go down and get some of that free salad and pizza. All the patients had been seen, nothing was going down, so they handed off the floor to the nurses and mid levels to go get some of that fancy pizza the folks in charge kept telling them to go get. This is normal; multiple staff qualified to run a code remained on the floor (a code is basically an algorithm for administering cpr, with attendant drugs). A medicine attending waited for them to leave the floor and go downstairs. The moment they were good and gone, he called a fake code. When the mid-levels, nurses, and med students arrived, all trained in running a code, the attending put them aside, and kept waiting for the residents to arrive. Eventually, of course, they did. They then proceeded to get ripped new assholes for having had the temerity to go downstairs for lunch after having been told by their seniors to do so, and leaving their patients appropriately covered. They got sent to lunch just so they could be scolded for getting lunch. But that sort of shit only happens to psych residents. Other residents would never be told to take 20 mins to grab lunch.
- Damogran6 7y agoI worked for State Government. They made a big deal of going to a 'pay for performance' program...You'd be paid for excellent work...Nobody would lose any pay...this program had no funding. Somebody was bad at math...or they thought we were bad at math. It did not improve morale.
- euler_angles 7y agoOne of my past employers gave us a "big Christmas bonus". It was a Twix Bar with a pen tied to the bar with a piece of holiday ribbon. The pen didn't work.
- dba7dba 7y agoI used to work at a kinda old, small startup shop. The office had 'filtered' water dispenser. BUT the filters had not been replaced for awhile and one day I noticed the water tasted filthy. The CEO's office was right next to the water dispenser spot. As I was walking through the hallway, I noticed cases of FIJI water bottles in his office. And no, it wasn't for us. It was ALL for him. For those who don't know, FIJI water bottle costs about 5 - 6 times more than regular water bottles.
- thisisawkwrd 7y agoMy last company cut everyone's quarterly bonuses and then handed out company branded fidget spinners.
- Havoc 7y agoThe comments here. Ouch. So far so good my side. For above avg a months pay and a extra day off
- parrellel 7y ago5 dollar Target gift card bonuses, and then after launching a major app on time a real bonus with a 3 page legal memorandum attached telling me it was not.
- iN7h33nD 7y agoMy first job, 8 months on relatively fresh to software dev. They announced we were going to have a pizza party the next day for all of our hard work this year. The next day come around and about an hour or two beforehand I see managers running, yes literally running, around the office and taking people aside. Turns out half the company was fired and there wasn't even pizza. They pretty much just said, we fired some people no big deal, back to work everyone.
- hackerbabz 7y agoMy company spent months building an internal, online reward site. You got points for going to unpaid classes in addition to your normal work hours. It had no backend validation and within 30 minutes I’d awarded myself some company sweatpants. I got an email a day later asking what size I wanted, and out of fear, I replied that I didn’t want them anymore and I never took another reward.
- me_again 7y agoMy manager gathered our team in a conference room to listen to the audio book of "Who moved my cheese". Which, if you're unfamiliar, is a lame allegory about how you shouldn't complain if you are fired or otherwise screwed over. The oddest part is that the layoffs everyone expected never materialized.
- aiyodev 7y agoGot an email saying we were getting rewarded with pizza for lunch. My desk was near the door. I saw the pizza delivery guy bring in the stacks of pizzas and put them in the conference room. A group of supervisors came to supervise the pizza delivery. Supervisors wore casual attire. Then a man came who must have been their boss because he wore a button up short. Then a man with a shirt and tie. Then a man in a suit. Finally, a man in an expensive suit I recognized as the VP. Everyone assembled waited for him as he looked at the stacks of pizzas, said something, and nodded. The supervisors then put the boxes on carts and started to distribute them. I finally got my two slices of cold pizza over an hour after they were delivered. Felt so appreciated.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- simonebrunozzi 7y agoLoved this comment on the article: > My then manager once closed a team meeting with the words, (literally): "Thank you, and whatever other motivational stuff l'm supposed to say".
- simonebrunozzi 7y agoI once worked at a large IT company. Several years ago, a high-ranking manager was off to Europe for some sport thing. The company had the biggest outage in its history, spanning several hours/days, and most of his team was working non-stop to handle customers and trying to fix issues. He decided to stay on vacation - his sport thing was too important to be canceled. Wait, the best part is yet to come. Months later we were having one of these kick-offs. He stood up on stage, started his slideshow, and offered a few pictures of sunny places where he was having fun playing that sport. Most people in the room knew what they were doing while he was having fun. One of the worst examples of leadership I've witnessed. That person was let go several months later.