7 ms·

Hard to tell without context, but that first example could easily be a positive: not only is extending grace to employees ethically a good thing to do, but it c

Hard to tell without context, but that first example could easily be a positive: not only is extending grace to employees ethically a good thing to do, but it can also lead to increased productivity in the long run. Of course, if the employee was completely MIA for an extended period of time and no effort was made to contact them, that's neither ethical nor productive.

purple-again 6y ago
Seems highly probable HR knew what was going on and was okay with it. Child died recently. Only one driving father to chemo appointments. Etc. not the kind of thing they would give any other employees a heads up on. It would be very strange if they had no idea and didn’t care that an employee wasn’t showing up. That kind of culture would get swamped fast.
- glenstein 6y ago
  >Seems highly probable HR knew what was going on and was okay with it. Child died recently. Only one driving father to chemo appointments. Etc. not the kind of thing they would give any other employees a heads up on. Is this based on direct knowledge or are you just listing possible examples? Because these examples are very different from what the ex-yahoo person mentioned in a follow-up comment: stuff like personal hobbies.
- vidarh 6y ago
  Yahoo was good at handling these types of things, but they were also good at keeping line management updated. I did have someone in my team at Yahoo I had to go to HR to get approval for special considerations due to a family member with cancer, and it was approved literally in minutes. But it's also well known that they were for a while very lax about handling unauthorised absence.
thinkingkong 6y ago
What kind of increase in productivity does just not showing up provide? People should be able to take sick days, personal days, mental health days, but disappearing should have raised concern from team members to see if that person is OK.
- bitslayer 6y ago
  Management could have been aware of more personal details that coworkers should not know. I don't think it is necessarily a black mark against the company without knowing the whole story.
  - greyhair 6y ago
    You can never be to certain what other people are dealing with outside of work. Sometimes, management knows things that they are not at liberty to share.
    - oneplane 6y ago
      <joke>Sometimes management hires a hitman to get rid of an annoying employee but then forgot about that awkward moment when they don't show up for work</joke>
    - jointpdf 6y ago
      Exactly. There are a vast number of incapacitating health related reasons that could cause a person to be absent, e.g. panic attacks, stuck in a bathroom (IBS/IBD/Chron’s), migraines, depression. The type of thing that reasonably wouldn’t be broadcasted out to the entire team. I think it’s better to just assume nothing unless you have direct knowledge that the employee is doing something blatantly unethical like working at another job (has happened before).
  - prepend 6y ago
    Management could also communicate to concerns coworkers that the absences are excused. They could also work with the employee to notify teammates in an appropriate way. Just allowing employees to disappear with no notice or trace is an environment where I won’t want to work. There are obviously situations where I have to not be at work suddenly (eg, medical emergency where I don’t want to share details) but I can just send a text to a boss or corworker and have them do the rest. If HR said they didn’t want to act to not hurt feelings that seems like there was no additional info, unless they thought that was a proper way to protect medical info (it isn’t). Sounds like a bad place to work and seems like a negative factor for companies wanting to do well or me awesome.
jtbayly 6y ago
Yeah, the rest of your team should totally not rely on you being there to pull your weight. They can handle things for you when you’re on call and no-show. Plus, we totally don’t have things like vacation and personal days for the times when somebody really needs a day off. /s
tarunkotia 6y ago
The point of being nice it seems that people were not repremended for bad behavior. That’s not a good thing for the culture because it’s demotivating for people who do things the right way as there is very little incentive in doing so.
- ansible 6y ago
  People in general are hugely sensitive to perceived unfairness. This is a critical thing to maintain in any organization. For example, you can take a group of five billionaires. Give the first four a little tax break for something, which totals up to only be a million each. No big deal, right? All these people are the 1% of the 1% of the 1%, the pinnacle of wealth in the world. There's no way that little tax break would prevent the 5th billionaire from buying the private island he always wanted, or whatever. In practice, though, that 5th billionaire will be pissed he didn't also get the tax break. He will spend a lot of time either angry at the situation, or spending that time also trying to get a tax break. Is that a good use of his time? He would be happier driving around on his 80ft yacht... if he could focus on that instead. But that's not how our brains are wired.
  - bshacklett 6y ago
    It's not just humans. This behavior seems to go pretty deep: https://phys.org/news/2017-02-animals-unfairly-dont.html https://phys.org/news/2017-02-animals-unfairly-dont.html
    - _jal 6y ago
      The cool thing is that cheat detection/unfairness detection seems to happen at the semantic level of reasoning. You can see this with kids - one example I recall is a friend's 5 year old being upset at seeing another kid with ice cream. $Parent said it was that kid's birthday (who knows), and her kid immediately got over it. So if only billionaires were human, we could just suggest their semantic categories were wrong. <rimshot>
      - 6y ago
nikhizzle 6y ago
The employee was taking off days without taking vacation to work on hobbies without telling HR or Management. He was just not showing up. This happened with many employees all the time.
- vidarh 6y ago
  Makes me feel like a chump for not taking advantage when I worked there.
- idlewords 6y ago
  My coworker at a Yahoo office in SF moved to Uruguay (where his wife is from) and then expected the company to fly him in for important meetings. He got away with it for a bit before HR caught wind. Even for them it was too much.
  - HappyDreamer 6y ago
    He got fired? Or moved back to SF?
    - prepend 6y ago
      Judging by the other stories I expect HR cracking down would be something “no more first class flights, only business.”
      - ghaff 6y ago
        HR's issue was probably more along the lines of you're violating internal policies and probably various tax, etc. laws if you're supposedly living in one place and are actually living somewhere else--especially in a different country.
    - idlewords 6y ago
      He reluctantly moved back after his boss got yelled at.

purple-again 6y ago

Seems highly probable HR knew what was going on and was okay with it. Child died recently. Only one driving father to chemo appointments. Etc. not the kind of thing they would give any other employees a heads up on. It would be very strange if they had no idea and didn’t care that an employee wasn’t showing up. That kind of culture would get swamped fast.

glenstein 6y ago
>Seems highly probable HR knew what was going on and was okay with it. Child died recently. Only one driving father to chemo appointments. Etc. not the kind of thing they would give any other employees a heads up on. Is this based on direct knowledge or are you just listing possible examples? Because these examples are very different from what the ex-yahoo person mentioned in a follow-up comment: stuff like personal hobbies.
vidarh 6y ago
Yahoo was good at handling these types of things, but they were also good at keeping line management updated. I did have someone in my team at Yahoo I had to go to HR to get approval for special considerations due to a family member with cancer, and it was approved literally in minutes. But it's also well known that they were for a while very lax about handling unauthorised absence.

thinkingkong 6y ago

What kind of increase in productivity does just not showing up provide? People should be able to take sick days, personal days, mental health days, but disappearing should have raised concern from team members to see if that person is OK.

bitslayer 6y ago
Management could have been aware of more personal details that coworkers should not know. I don't think it is necessarily a black mark against the company without knowing the whole story.
- greyhair 6y ago
  You can never be to certain what other people are dealing with outside of work. Sometimes, management knows things that they are not at liberty to share.
  - oneplane 6y ago
    <joke>Sometimes management hires a hitman to get rid of an annoying employee but then forgot about that awkward moment when they don't show up for work</joke>
  - jointpdf 6y ago
    Exactly. There are a vast number of incapacitating health related reasons that could cause a person to be absent, e.g. panic attacks, stuck in a bathroom (IBS/IBD/Chron’s), migraines, depression. The type of thing that reasonably wouldn’t be broadcasted out to the entire team. I think it’s better to just assume nothing unless you have direct knowledge that the employee is doing something blatantly unethical like working at another job (has happened before).
- prepend 6y ago
  Management could also communicate to concerns coworkers that the absences are excused. They could also work with the employee to notify teammates in an appropriate way. Just allowing employees to disappear with no notice or trace is an environment where I won’t want to work. There are obviously situations where I have to not be at work suddenly (eg, medical emergency where I don’t want to share details) but I can just send a text to a boss or corworker and have them do the rest. If HR said they didn’t want to act to not hurt feelings that seems like there was no additional info, unless they thought that was a proper way to protect medical info (it isn’t). Sounds like a bad place to work and seems like a negative factor for companies wanting to do well or me awesome.

jtbayly 6y ago

Yeah, the rest of your team should totally not rely on you being there to pull your weight. They can handle things for you when you’re on call and no-show. Plus, we totally don’t have things like vacation and personal days for the times when somebody really needs a day off. /s

tarunkotia 6y ago

The point of being nice it seems that people were not repremended for bad behavior. That’s not a good thing for the culture because it’s demotivating for people who do things the right way as there is very little incentive in doing so.

ansible 6y ago
People in general are hugely sensitive to perceived unfairness. This is a critical thing to maintain in any organization. For example, you can take a group of five billionaires. Give the first four a little tax break for something, which totals up to only be a million each. No big deal, right? All these people are the 1% of the 1% of the 1%, the pinnacle of wealth in the world. There's no way that little tax break would prevent the 5th billionaire from buying the private island he always wanted, or whatever. In practice, though, that 5th billionaire will be pissed he didn't also get the tax break. He will spend a lot of time either angry at the situation, or spending that time also trying to get a tax break. Is that a good use of his time? He would be happier driving around on his 80ft yacht... if he could focus on that instead. But that's not how our brains are wired.
- bshacklett 6y ago
  It's not just humans. This behavior seems to go pretty deep: https://phys.org/news/2017-02-animals-unfairly-dont.html https://phys.org/news/2017-02-animals-unfairly-dont.html
  - _jal 6y ago
    The cool thing is that cheat detection/unfairness detection seems to happen at the semantic level of reasoning. You can see this with kids - one example I recall is a friend's 5 year old being upset at seeing another kid with ice cream. $Parent said it was that kid's birthday (who knows), and her kid immediately got over it. So if only billionaires were human, we could just suggest their semantic categories were wrong. <rimshot>
    - 6y ago

nikhizzle 6y ago

The employee was taking off days without taking vacation to work on hobbies without telling HR or Management. He was just not showing up. This happened with many employees all the time.

vidarh 6y ago
Makes me feel like a chump for not taking advantage when I worked there.
idlewords 6y ago
My coworker at a Yahoo office in SF moved to Uruguay (where his wife is from) and then expected the company to fly him in for important meetings. He got away with it for a bit before HR caught wind. Even for them it was too much.
- HappyDreamer 6y ago
  He got fired? Or moved back to SF?
  - prepend 6y ago
    Judging by the other stories I expect HR cracking down would be something “no more first class flights, only business.”
    - ghaff 6y ago
      HR's issue was probably more along the lines of you're violating internal policies and probably various tax, etc. laws if you're supposedly living in one place and are actually living somewhere else--especially in a different country.
  - idlewords 6y ago
    He reluctantly moved back after his boss got yelled at.