11 ms·
When employees feel slighted, they work less
- moominpapa 9mo ago[flagged]
- blurbleblurble 9mo agoThanks professor, my boss didn't believe me when I tried to hint it
- aetherson 9mo agoOn 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?
- maxerickson 9mo agoBase rate is likely quite low.
- tetha 9mo agoI'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.
- dmurray 9mo agoThis 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?
- jampekka 9mo agoPer abstract it's a "a dynamic difference-in-differences" analysis, which means likely that they see whether the employee behavior changes after the event. But establishing causation with it still requires quite a few assumptions. PNAS is kinda known for headline grabbing research with at times a bit less rigorous methodology. https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2017/10/04/breaking-pnas-changes-slogan/ https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2017/10/04/breaking-p... > 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. If the results are true, it would be actually quite expensive because of the drop in productivity. It could also be a bit of a nightmare to push through ethical review.
- dmurray 9mo agoThey could start by observing the rate at which birthday cards are delivered on time, and not vary too much from that. I suppose the impact on productivity isn't known in advance, and it might be that failing to receive a birthday card from a normally diligent manager costs the company more in productivity than it gains from a sloppy manager unexpectedly giving one on time.
- zelphirkalt 9mo agoHowever, if at some point somehow it shines through, that this is just another checklist being ticked off, without actual sincerity behind it, this all goes down the drain, and the time would be better spent on actual work environment improvements, rather than wet handshakes and pseudo "we are a family".
- ghaff 9mo agoI don't really mind but I take a slight objection to supposedly confidential data (like birthday) being widely shared even with good intentions.
- trollbridge 9mo agoBirthdays are hardly confidential.
- DamonHD 9mo agoThey should be unless you want to publish one of the things that too many (eg sites) regard as a reasonable secondary security verifier.
- ghaff 9mo agoAnd health records, e.g. prescriptions, as well.
- trollbridge 9mo agoGet a single speeding ticket in most jurisdictions in the U.S. and your birthdate is never confidential ever again.
- Insanity 9mo agoIt depends on the culture/religion. Not everyone celebrates birthdays. I had multiple ICs ask me not to say public birthday wishes, as they didn’t celebrate their birthday and/or did not want the rest of the team to know.
- ghaff 9mo agoThey're not really for many people (and, personally, I don't go to any extremes to keep it a secret). But sharing info like that from an HR record without permission feels a bit wrong even if others here obviously disagree.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- mitchellst 9mo agoAgreed. 3 things are interesting. How small the slight is. How big the effect is. Meta thing: how the slight is not the kind of thing most managers or executives, or even knowledge workers generally, would care about. (As evidenced by the software people here questioning if a birthday wish is a big deal.) Lesson: your employees think differently than you. Get curious.
- jacknews 9mo agoThis 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'
- freehorse 9mo agoYeah, 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.
- nizbit 9mo agoI think zfg is a measurable quantity.
- LightBug1 9mo agoIt'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.
- pavel_lishin 9mo ago> 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.
- DerArzt 9mo agoYeah, naw. My team ended up firing an engineer who could have been reading comics or something for the first hour or two. The guy usually showed up to meetings but didn't deliver any work for three months.
- nchmy 9mo agohow does most academia ever get funding?
- turtlesdown11 9mo agoyeah why have data when you can just use vibes
- njhnjhnjh 9mo ago[flagged]
- docstryder 9mo agoBreaking news: when it rains, people get wet
- warkanlock 9mo agoYes. We needed an essay to crack this one
- leothekim 9mo agoI understand the co-authors are research fellows at the Maximegalon Institute of Slowly and Painfully Working Out the Surprisingly Obvious
- kranner 9mo agoIf 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.
- pavel_lishin 9mo agoWould 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?
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- stego-tech 9mo ago> Would the people who need such a reminder actually accept the research, and change their behavior? No. They will give you formal discipline for raising such concerns regardless of your professionalism in doing so and ultimately lay you off for being a squeaky wheel. Ask me how I know. > Are they even aware of the effects of their behavior? This is the better question to be asking, IMO. Many are aware of the effect and either don’t care or find enjoyment from it, while many more have no clue why their star worker has dropped the ball after being denied a raise or promotion three years running. There are a few who know the effects and are sympathetic, but they’re often in the position of facing similar retribution if they stand up for their workers, and so they don’t. It’s a gruesome shit show, man.
- dbshapco 9mo agoWhen I was in university I took a lot of courses in management science, which is basically a lot of applied psychology, and learned a lot of stuff like this. Then I went out into industry and watched as all these principles about managing employees effectively were ignored, or at best received lip service. It led me to the conclusion that actually effectively managing employees to motivate better performance wasn't a priority. Not in the top ten anyway. Most corporations and therefore managers operate using resource extraction principles. How do I extract maximum labour from this resource at lowest cost? The 'R' in HR always bothered me, and others judging by the companies that used nomenclature like 'talent' or 'people'. However that was whitewash. Underneath the nomenclature resource extraction continued unimpeded. The irony being that treating people like resources is counterproductive and hurts performance. Companies extracted the illusion of more resources, more hours, while productivity largely plateaued or decreased. Somehow corporations expected to hire smart people, smart enough to do an intellectually challenging and technical job, and not have them do the math that the additional pay for performance generally amortized lower than the hourly rate, and that by doing more employees were actually lowering their effective hourly rate -- i.e. discounting labour for the employer. The wag in me would observe the reason companies were so eager to portray everyone as family is that's the only model where this is marginally acceptable. Family taking advantage of family, like a family farm. Working more hours to get paid less certainly doesn't work as a business model for the employees. They'd be better off with a second salaried job -- and there were apocryphal stories about employees doing actually that, hanging up a coat on the door hook, throwing a newspaper on their desk, then leaving to go to their other job. This is all observational and anecdotal however, but over a three decade career with a dozen plus companies, some of them Fortune N (where 20 <= N <= 500) in both contractor, IC, senior leadership and C-level roles.
- -0 9mo agoI wonder if this is true for PhD students
- DamonHD 9mo agoBad PIs seem to be a real problem. Luckily I'm self-funded and with good supervisors, so not a problem that I face!
- serial_dev 9mo agoIt’s just their roundabout way of complaining about their boss forgetting their birthday.
- Lord-Jobo 9mo agoLots 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.
- lotsofpulp 9mo ago> 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.
- javier2 9mo ago
- Leynos 9mo agoIs paying $20 to read this the only option?
- Leynos 9mo agoAddendum: Tables from the study available here: https://www.pnas.org/action/downloadSupplement?doi=10.1073%2Fpnas.2503650122&file=pnas.2503650122.sapp.pdf https://www.pnas.org/action/downloadSupplement?doi=10.1073%2...
- WillAdams 9mo agoThe 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/how-one-company-levels-the-pay-slope-of-executives-and-workers/article15472738/ 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.
- bagacrap 9mo agoOf 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.
- UK-Al05 9mo agoAnd 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.
- WillAdams 9mo agoI 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).
- pinnochio 9mo agoThere'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.
- mejutoco 9mo ago> 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)
- pinnochio 9mo agoI 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.
- kotaKat 9mo agoFrom the further linked https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/when-employees-feel-slighted-they-work-less/ 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.
- nsgi 9mo agoAs a Brit, the birthday card example feels oddly American. The effect seems plausible, but the UK equivalent slight would be something much more informal
- pinnochio 9mo agoI 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.
- SoftTalker 9mo agoMy only experience with acknowledging birthdays at work is that you do it yourself if you want to. Most jobs I've had, birthdays are just not recognized at all, but at one employer the tradition was that you brought in donuts to share on your birthday (if you wanted to--it wasn't required of course).
- t-3 9mo agoAs an American, I would be totally creeped out if a manager even knew my birthday, let alone gave me a card. When I've seen people feel slighted in the workplace, it's usually due to uneven praise or criticism, or discriminatory stuff like passing over all the black workers with years of experience to promote the one white guy who's been there for 6 months.
- dbcurtis 9mo agoWell, if your manager can see your employee file (which they can.... certainly in Worlday) they will know your birthday. Oddly, at my employer, celebration of individual birthdays is discouraged, I have heard it is because it might make someone feel uncomfortable being called out for aging. As someone who is probably in the oldest 1% of the company... I find that amusingly curious. Birthdays are a good excuse for a team celebration, and that is almost always good team bonding.
- knallfrosch 9mo ago> 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.
- Finnucane 9mo agoIf 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.
- iamflimflam1 9mo agoExactly, and even worse, I'm sure the managers remember some people's birthdays.
- jmyeet 9mo agoA 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number
- e3bc54b2 9mo ago> 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.
- bookofsleepyjoe 9mo ago[flagged]
- fredflint 9mo agoA 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.
- hypeatei 9mo agoMaybe 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.
- varispeed 9mo agoEmployee is a resource to be mined at as little cost as possible. Employment is designed to take advantage of you in every way possible. Never go above and beyond, always work enough to piss off your manager, but not enough to get you fired.
- aarmenaa 9mo agoYeah, I am always going to interpret that sort of thing as performative. There seems to be whole corporate mythology that is absolutely sure there are a bunch of cheap, low-effort things managers can do to raise morale and get more productivity out of employees, like office birthday parties. I propose a name for adherents to this philosophy: the Pizza Party Cult.
- nuancebydefault 9mo ago> see the employee-manager relationship as adversarial by default. I don't see how anyone can be happy in their job if that were the default. Maybe I am naive or lucky, but I have a very goed relation with my boss, as well as with the boss above. When that condition is not fulfilled, i definitely tend to slack off and I will eventually leave. I believe such should be the default.
- catlifeonmars 9mo agoThe relationship between owners and workers has always been extractive. The adversarial relationship is built in. That doesn’t mean that you can’t have a good relationship with your employer, but there is always a conflict of interest, so to speak. I’ve had great relationships with my bosses, but they’re always under pressure to extract more work from the workers. In turn, their bosses are also pressured to do the same. So yes, it’s not the default and you and I have both been lucky.
- taway112233 9mo agoThis 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.
- reactordev 9mo agoSometimes the best managers are the ones that aren’t emotionally vested and just expect the work to be done right. You don’t have to be anyone but yourself. You don’t have to change who you are simply because you’re a manager now. You can simply continue being you. Allow those under you to be them. The hardest part of management is managing up.
- elzbardico 9mo agoA surprising effect, who would imagine it?
- diogenescynic 9mo agoI 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. I may not control the scope or even volume of work assigned to me, but I do control the pace and why bother working faster/harder for nothing?
- staindk 9mo agoThat sucks. The following is unsolicited stuff you probably already know - feel free to ignore. I would heavily suggest speaking frankly about this with your manager or even going above their head if needed to ensure someone hears and acknowledges this. With your review in hand and any other additional info that can help back you up. Ask what you need to focus on to secure a substantial Y raise/promotion and bonus etc. over the next X months and work towards that, keeping management updated as things progress. Probably have specific numbers for X and Y to mention as targets.
- diogenescynic 9mo agoThanks and appreciate it. I did try that last year but it honestly went no where. I work on a financial system at a fintech company but I am on the finance side and my managers and above have never even logged into the system so they don't understand, appreciate, or really have interest in it. All they hear about are breaks in data, or some trivial error (99% caused by the bank or employee inputting a payment incorrectly, etc.) so they hear more negative feedback which I think biases them instead of them understanding that the failure rate is less than 1% and when you have 50,000 payments there's going to always be something that goes wrong--it could be as simple as the date. I implemented a change that allowed us to invest more funds and added almost 10 figures in interest income, but I'm not sure anyone but my manager even knows that. I ultimately blame my manager, he's old and useless and seems to be unmotivated to deliver anything for his direct reports.
- staindk 9mo ago
- petercooper 9mo agoConversely, I wonder if employers who feel slighted by those employees, pay and promote them less.
- stego-tech 9mo agoMy 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.
- mitchellst 9mo agoI think this is actually where the study is interesting. Because the “no duh!” Comments actually have merit on their face. But the argument is that these are tiny slights—not harassment, not pervasive toxicity. By definition it’s the kind of thing management doesn’t notice. So I think the argument is that employers consider those employees to be some default percentage of the workforce, and the argument is that you can move the entire performance bar up by hiring/training managers to be thoughtful and consistent.
- reactordev 9mo agoOranges are orange, tonight at 11…
- mystraline 9mo agoSo, now we have metrics of what "slighted at work" does to work. Just like the terrible outcomes of fraud elimination indicate non-zero fraud is preferred, I can see a similar nom-zero dissatisfaction at work the same. Except now companies can calibrate how much dissatisfaction due to terrible policies can be done in response to lower work quality, and minmax that. Reading between the lines, the paper is how to manage dissatisfaction in relation to work and cost. In other words, "How bad can we make it for the minimum work product needed?"
- metalman 9mo agoAs a small business owner who often has to deal with that worst possible ratio 1:1 for management/employee, I can promise you that emoloyees are premptivly looking for reasons to get there digs in, and often show up enacting vengence? in the form of vandalism from day 1. As I have never taken shit from an employer, I walk out and get another job imediatly, I have no sympathy for passive agressives whatsoever and despise the world we have built that can absorb the damage and still net a profit, which of course does not work for small business, so I am becoming very up front with prospective hires, and forceing a conversation about personal expectations and needs, which is very challenging as they have been trained to say whatever is needed to get hired, NOW!, and worry about anything else later.
- mystraline 9mo agohttps://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:1100/format:webp/1*ikF8YiS4t7zyZe9RZ6Z9ZA.jpeg https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:1100/format:webp/1*ikF... When nobody wants to work for you, that should be a strong indication that you are the problem. And thinking that employees are "enacting vengence? in the form of vandalism from day 1."... You must be terrible indeed.
- metalman 9mo agoI get unsoliseted offers from job seekers, every day. Any destructive actions on the part of employees has been completly unprovoked, the reasons might be conected to a perception of metal working bieng a "macho" tough guy, right wing, field, but I am more of a "nature boy" back to the lander, and aint shy, or small, or tollerant of "dog whistles".......so in that way, oh fuck ya!, I am a n8ghtmare on preconceptions.
- mystraline 9mo agoI hope you get the mental health care you sorely need. The world is not out to get you, no matter how much you think it is.
- SilentM68 9mo agoThat sounds about right from my experience. There's nothing worse than feeling excluded or manipulated by management or coworkers.
- aleph_minus_one 9mo ago> There's nothing worse than feeling excluded or manipulated by management or coworkers. What people call "social skills" is nearly always manipulating other people into liking you. People of who its is said that they "lack social skills" are often more honest and much less manipulative.
- hackable_sand 9mo ago.... no... That's not how that works
- SilentM68 9mo agoIn my experience, where management is concerned, when employees demonstrated a bit more knowledge, a bit more fluidity, greater ease of communication, I noticed a very distinct change in management's demeaner towards the employees. The above comments are based on my past experience only. This past experience has made everyone involved a bit more sinical with respect to the importance of management. I personally think management should be replaced with an AI that can be turned on and off, as needed :)
- SilentM68 9mo agoHmm, that has a ring of truth to it. I rarely stayed in jobs where managers tended to silence my points of view or opinions, rather than listening to it. That's not to say that there have been many job opportunities. Perhaps managers/others view honesty and directness as a threat to their position or authority. I've noticed that it is not localized to places of work but looks to be prevalent in most other societal situations. Perhaps emotional intelligence training should be incorporated into school curriculums, so children learn at an early age a bit of tolerance to other diverse points of views. I've tended to limit my posting in places like these as I've noticed a lack of emotional intelligence from some of the people that have replied. This is rather evident from the downward spiral exhibited by the constant downvoting of my comments. I prefer to take the high road with sarcastic levity whenever possible :)
- therobots927 9mo agoEhrm, actually, it’s better to constantly threaten layoffs and lead by fear. Employees are replaceable cogs who need to prove their value to the business. President Musk has made this very clear and most leaders in big tech (with the notable exception of Tim Cook) have followed suit. This radical approach (based on Jack Welch management principles from the 80s) will certainly yield outstanding business outcomes. All of the above is sarcastic for those who find it difficult to pick up on tone in text.
- billy99k 9mo ago"The lost productivity was a form of revenge, with slighted employees taking more paid sick time, arriving late, leaving early, and taking longer breaks." Someone will feel slighted no matter how well you treat them. I blame all of the 'micro-aggression' nonsense we've seen in the last couple of years and subreddits like /r/antiwork. This sounds like just the kind of thing that's encouraged there. "The study found that when managers at a national retail chain failed to deliver birthday greetings on time, it resulted in a 50% increase in absenteeism and a reduction of more than two working hours per month. " Most people I know don't care about their birthday (or being recognized) to this extent. Years ago, I worked at a place that decided to celebrate everyone's birthday that week with a cake and a 10/15 minute meeting (usually multiple birthdays were celebrated at the same time). As the company grew, we were having these meetings 3-times per week. My 6 year old would care if their birthday didn't get recognized and similarly pout all day and seek this type of 'revenge'. I wouldn't want to work with anyone that did this.
- bigyabai 9mo ago> I blame all of the 'micro-aggression' nonsense we've seen in the last couple of years and subreddits like /r/antiwork. Also known as "passive aggressive behavior" to people who aren't primarily educated by episodes of South Park.
- cess11 9mo agoWorthy of the Ig Nobel. Not surprised it's a management consultant factory in Israel that have uncovered these titillating results.
- midlander 9mo agoWhat are you trying to say?
- nullorempty 9mo agoAt a company I work for we get b-day cards promptly. They all get sent by workday :) What I found upsets me the most is companies paying no respect to my private time. They all want me to be on-call and carry my laptop with me. Hiking, on a beach, at a restaurant, sleeping at night – i am expected to be reachable and get on it right away. Some international companies don't even try to schedule support according to time-zone sighting on-call efficiency and knowledge segregation. And yet, they fücking refuse every effort developers make to focus on fixing issues leading to incidents. They fücking need to fix their act.
- jstummbillig 9mo agoThe first two paragraphs of that article are a wild incoherent ride, mixing all kinds of things, that have very little to do with each other (feel slighted [...] even the slightest mistreatment [...] failed to deliver birthday greetings on time) Regardless of the analysis and without having read the study, I agree with the sentiment in the headline and it's sad agreement that matches my experience: Making employees feel not slighted works really well – for both the company and the employee. It does not require that you respect anyone, and actually often runs counter it. Once you figure that out as an employer, I can see why you would chose to just get better at fooling and distracting people.
- drweevil 9mo agoThe subject may sound silly, but we evolved this way. For the greatest part of human existence we were part of small social groups. We each took part in every activity. Our 'work' was for the group, and for ourselves. Those we worked with, we lived with, so in order to maintain group cohesion (and to not get stabbed in our sleep) we learned to get along. Current work practices violate a lot of those deeply set social mores. I'd love to see a study that looks into this hypothesis. Could explain a lot of the misery and depression in our modern life.
- nicbou 9mo agoIsn't that Karl Marx's theory of alienation?
- MSFT_Edging 9mo agoI believe that's more along the lines of being alienated from the work itself. IE a potter sees the results of his work in the pots he creates. A worker in an assembly line sees a small aspect of the pot creation and is separated from the end result. Many of us will understand the joy of a personal project and the lack of joy in completing an issue ticket. It's generally good for one's mental health to have some kind of purpose behind their work.
- vimwizard 9mo agoI received a title bump without pay increase to Senior after doing senior work for 4 years because our senior bracket is capped by lifers waiting to retire (I like them as people but they are checked out, professionally). It just left a bad taste in my mouth that it took so long to be recognized officially. To put things into context, I'm basically operating as an engineering consultant to the rest of our senior staff and directors across multiple teams. In larger companies, perhaps I would be an intermediate IC, but in this company I am definitely responsible for more than my ICs. It's my fault for not holding them to it, and should have realized earlier that I'm working under management that only reacts to things immediately happening to them.
- bdangubic 9mo ago> I received a title bump without pay increase I have been SWE for 30 years now and this is one of the most boggling things I’ve seen over the years. I hope my daughter never has to do the work I did in my career but if she actually has an office job I will tell her to quit immediately if this was offered to her (leave the job immediately without any notice, just pack up and go). This is not a promotion but an insult.
- Archelaos 9mo agoThe headline is missleading. The study is not about actually being slighted, but imagining being slighted ("percieved mistreatment"). Whether the outcome would be similar when people were really mistreated in the described way is unknown.
- class3shock 9mo agoSlightly off topic but does anyone know if there are studies looking at the use of negative vs positive "reinforcement" on employees in order to increase productivity, reduce costs, whatever-metric-you-want-to-pick? In my professional life I have never seen people respond well to cost cutting, layoffs, understaffing, corporate bs, etc. It is always demoralizing, resulting in reduced performance and I can only imagine worse outcomes for the company overall. But despite this I have never seen a company do the opposite and respond with offering incentives for better performance. I don't know if this is industry specific (I've mostly been in defense oriented companies) but was curious.
- goshcoding 9mo agoOff the top of my head, I think people that work sales and earn commissions and any tip-based work might be the ones to look into. I imagine there's studies around those types of jobs.
- pvtmert 9mo agoIn my ~10 year tenure, every single manager/boss I had was a variation of Michael Scott. This is in terms of both good and bad. I could literally write 20 page essay about every single piece of slighting, favouritism, discrimination, overstepping labour law, then trying to cover up by denial/not remembering/false pretences even fake witnesses. But, this firstly quite lots of work, secondly the risk of them chasing me back and suing for damages is not worth it, thirdly, it will seem "unprofessional" by the managers/leadership (or future prospects) anyway.
- sizzzzlerz 9mo agoYou mean those memes stating "The beatings will continue until morale improves" aren't effective?
- codr7 9mo agoRight, if you're nasty to people, they're less likely to be helpful in the future. And helpful employees are priceless. Goes around, comes around. Bad news for all the a-holes out there who've built careers out of bullying others to do mediocre work.
- charles_f 9mo agoI couldn't care less that my manager wishes me happy birthday, but when the company makes 12% profit growth and doesn't give raises because of "the crisis", I feel like taking that raise myself in the form of less work
- chipsrafferty 9mo agoHave there been any studies about the lack of raises and productivity? Because the way I see it, if you hired me 3 years ago at X per hour, and I haven't gotten any raises, then because of inflation, I should work 5% or so less hard every year.
- dyauspitr 9mo agoI usually don’t shame my reports in public unless shaming them in private doesn’t work twice. However the most “successful” people I’ve seen do all their shaming immediately and in public. I also find shaming in person a lot easier than shaming on slack.
- rexpop 9mo agoDon't do that. High-performing teams maintain a ratio of approxima ~6:1 positive comments for every criticism. Systematic use of shame aligns with toxic leadership patterns that produce measurably negative outcomes. Public humiliation at work can compromise social connectedness, threaten an employee's sense of belongingness, and create adversarial environments where constructive measures become impossible. When employees are disciplined publicly in front of their teams, they experience a complex mix of shame and self-doubt directed inward, compounded by anger and distrust directed outward. Organizations lacking psychological safety fail to create cooperative collaboration environments, directly harming employee well-being and organizational performance. The scientific literature overwhelmingly supports constructive feedback delivered privately with specific, actionable guidance focused on behaviors rather than personal attacks.