There's a lot of jeering, I suspect at the headline more than anything, but having documented research can be helpful in changing management behavior. The changes in employee behavior documented here are not ones that managers would easily connect to their past behavior, such as a late birthday recognition.
When you train a dog, you have to give a reward very soon after the desired behavior, otherwise the dog won't associate the reward with the behavior. Likewise, a manager is not going to associate a slight towards an employee with an increase in absenteeism or lower productivity that happens days and weeks later.
> late birthday recognition.
if someone is going to feel slighted and similar things add up to them working less, they probably are not a great colleague to begin with.
What matters more are: assignment to rewarding work, get paid top dollar, not be bored, get recognition for success, coaching on career growth, given leeway to make mistakes, not overlooked for promotion, etc.
> When you train a dog, you have to give a reward very soon after the desired behavior, otherwise the dog won't associate the reward with the behavior
Regarding dog training, one can use a placeholder for the reward. This is useful, for example, if you want to reward a dolphin jumping through a hula, because you will not be able to give the reward at that moment, but for example, you can say "yes!" or use a clicker at that moment, and give the reward later, and it will be clear what caused it.
For anyone training any animal, I recommend the book: Don't Shoot the Dog! The New Art of Teaching and Training by Karen Pryor (not affiliated in any way)
Have we got to the point where we need an article telling us that slighting people doesn't help their motivation? Perhaps the answer is yes when we also compare a worker's motivation to a dog's motivation seemingly without irony.
Leadership, authority, command, etc. have many forms that don't necessarily match up with what is effective or how people would like to be treated as a subordinate. Assuming that managers know better than to be assholes to their employees (or vice-versa) is a huge and very wrong assumption. Social skills also benefit training and practice like anything else. Many people have never seen or experienced professional and competent management, so they have no example to follow or model to emulate.
Having a documented effect and effect size puts this in terms that can change manager behavior, even a somewhat callous one, because they can see how it affects their own professional goals.
Btw, the comparison was between the dog and manager, and about the association of cause and effect. Maybe you should try to read more carefully and charitably in the future.
Well, to many it seemed that an obvious cause-and-effect fact that should have come from empathy and introspection--that workers are just like you and I don't like being slighted--and didn't need to be written about.
Yet when of the top comments used dog training to explain manager-worker relations--something that empathy and introspection could tell you was a bit off (would you feel slighted if I make our interactions analogous to an owner and dog?)--it may show, yes, such does need to be spelt out these days.
I recall the University of Manchester was teaching university students empathy.
Again, the comparison was between a dog and a manager. There's zero insinuation that a manager is like an owner and an employee like a dog. It does feel like you're looking for a pretext to feel slighted here.
That aside, I completely agree with you that managers should engage in empathy and introspection. I still think it's helpful, even for those that do, to have some empirical confirmation of how strongly employees can be affected by what might seem a simple oversight to an otherwise empathetic and introspective manager. But unfortunately, callous people tend to be chosen for management, and this research is also potentially helpful in aligning their own self-interest with their employees.
> Have we got to the point where we need an article telling us that slighting people doesn't help their motivation?
American culture is unfortunately permeated with examples, and habits, and expectations around punishing the behaviors you'd want to see. I see subtle things like that all the time. So while I doubt anyone who stopped to actually think about the concrete implications of their behavior, more specifically their unconscious habits; wouldn't be able to describe how insulting people, or really, how discouraging people is likely to have a negative outcome. The catch being, most people don't stop to consider anything. Thoes who do, are exceptionally rare.
As an example, someone posted a comment providing context, and encouraging people to be curious and grow their skill set with techniques that will help them with dogs, (and yes, these do translate to humans as well.)
Which invited a negative comment from you attacking people who aren't perfect every single moment of every single day, who might benefit from a reminder that how they treat others matters. Also indirectly attacking the person you replied to.
(See what I mean about the culture of punishing the behavior, you want to see? Or did you intend to discourage curiosity?)
> Perhaps the answer is yes when we also compare a worker's motivation to a dog's motivation seemingly without irony.
You can train a human using the exact same skills you use to train a dog. Just because humans are also, in addition to those able to do a lot more, and learn in an astronomically larger set of ways, doesn't exclude the techniques that work best with dogs. You forget this at your own peril. I.e. if the way you behave wouldn't encourage the behavior you want from a dog well, it sure as hell wont encourage the behavior from a human. All humans, including you, are not that special, get over yourself. rhetorically speaking
Technically I believe the dog is the manager in this metaphor.
The length of time between behaviour and reward/punishment is too great. So to train your manager you need to go home straight away.
I think you responded to the wrong post. I did not suggest or made any of these comparisons or comments. I simply recommended a book about training dogs or other animals, and the clicker method.
I thought this was more about training your manager...
Many of the people who use this forum are terminally socially inept.
I don't mean that to be facetious. I mean that a small but significant portion of the people here will die because of their social isolation and inability to communicate effectively.
what heuristic are you using to reach this broad conclusion? what do you propose could be done to alleviate the issue you perceive?
Thank You
I thought it was interesting. Going through something like this myself right now, I learned that I don't lose motivation to do the work. I gain a motivation to cut the person out of the picture.
I suppose the employee-getting-revenge-on-manager equivalent would be playing some loud, annoying sound immediately after the slight, and then engaging in absenteeism and cutting work early later on.
Engineering managers treat their dogs with greater respect than their employees.
Perhaps it may help to work on your social skills with more intent. People who often find themselves disrespected at work aren't always bad performers but they do tend to have large social blind spots they themselves aren't aware of.
Why do you jump to the conclusion of parent being the problem? Your comment implicitly accepts that people's social skills can be problematic, but you assume it isn't the manager?
Or maybe, quite a few managers need to work on their social skills. It is genuinely weird that the expectation of emotional and social management always falls on engineer in these debates. Maybe, just maybe, a manager with supposedly higher social skills should be able to manage relationships with engineers better.
Indeed. I've had a few of those. I also had a couple that were really good.
Dogs or managers?
Yep.
A lot of this is already known.
If I find out that management is being adversarial to ICs (eg. not offering to pay 75th percentile salaries, giving crap equity offers) I've put pressure to let heads roll. Similarly, if I've seen ICs become adversarial (eg. quiet quitting, overemployed, ignoring brutally honest conversations to upskill, constantly undermining product roadmaps) I've often allowed heads to roll as well.
At least in the Bay Area, the "Netflix Model" has become the norm post-COVID - pay top dollar, but also be open to fire if interests do not align.
What I've noticed in my career as an IC and management is a lot of lower-mid level management are people who were promoted well beyond where their capabilities. To be brutally honest, the stereotypical snarky HNer who is promoted to Staff Eng with an option to become an EM is the worst hire in any organization.
> If I find out that management is being adversarial to ICs (eg. not offering to pay 75th percentile salaries
I find this funny because it suggests an equilibrium point where 75% of management must be adversarial by definition.
Adversarial is a loaded word. In my experience, the management I’d call most adversarial occurred at companies paying 80th to 90th percentile or higher. The attitude is that they’re paying employees enough that they need to shut up and put up with anything that comes their way. If you don’t like it, we have a list of qualified applicants who will gladly take your place in a heartbeat and won’t complain as much because those paychecks are larger than what they made at their last company.
> To be brutally honest, the stereotypical snarky HNer who is promoted to Staff Eng with an option to become an EM is the worst hire in any organization.
I think the trend where companies made Staff Eng into a pseudo-management role without reports was a mistake. It gets defended heavily by people who hold that role, but in the real world the Staff Eng people I’ve worked with who don’t really write code but float around and tell people what to do and how to do it become bad for an organization over time. It’s a trap because those people are often very valuable right after they’re promoted, but the roles where they become disconnected from writing code but retain the engineer title leads to a disconnectedness that flips toward counterproductive after a few years. It goes from having an experienced person coaching others to having someone with outdated and mostly abstract knowledge who gets to gatekeep everyone’s activities based on how things worked several years ago when they were still hands on.
> companies paying 80th to 90th percentile or higher. The attitude is that they’re paying employees enough that they need to shut up and put up with anything that comes their way. If you don’t like it, we have a list of qualified applicants who will gladly take your place in a heartbeat and won’t complain as much because those paychecks are larger than what they made at their last company
Well, yes in a way.
Criticism is expected and encouraged, but if it is done so while ignoring the 3 primary goals of a business:
1. Drive revenue growth
2. Expand TAM
3. Land strategic deals (not all customers are equal)
and is provided without a solution, you will be replaced. I don't care if we leave a bug open if it means not being able to release feature X to help land Acme's mid 7 figure TCV deal.
If an employee thinks they know better, they can try to become a PM or start a competitor.
The bad experiences mentioned above really took off during COVID, and this is why we are seeing the pendulum swing the opposite direction.
Maybe I'm a bit jaded, and corporate environments have taken their toll, but I see the employee-manager relationship as adversarial by default. Whether my boss wishes me happy birthday or not doesn't move the needle much. I'm there to contribute as an individual and he's there to answer to his boss about staffing, budgeting, and performance.
Although, I do feel slighted when a manager acknowledges the absurdity of all the corporatisms we hear everyday then proceeds to preach them to everyone and waste time anyway. Like, please, I thought we just agreed this is all fluff.
Employee 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.
The big concept which needs to be included in this discussion is "payslope" --- for an excellent article on this, and an example of a company which handles this well, see:
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/time-to-lead/h...
I have never regretted a purchase from Lee Valley, and highly recommend all of their products.
Lee died about a decade ago; I don't know whether they still have this policy. (One immediate change was that their stores started being open on Sunday.)
In ‘our’ field, HP, under founders Hewlett and Packard, ran into some trouble in 1970 and instituted a “9 day fortnight”: rather than lay anyone off, everyone took a 10% cut in pay and hours.
Of course a small company of under 1000 employees is going to have a lower executive pay and therefore lower pay gap/ratio than a Fortune 500 company.
As someone who has a 401k, I certainly hope that the CEOs of our biggest companies are more highly compensated (~competent) than the CEO of Martin's Chicken Shack.
I hope that the CEOs of our biggest companies will be called to demonstrate the same sort of integrity and compassion which Robin Lee and his father have, and I'd rather have that than more money in my pocket or my 401K (which I've done my best to direct towards investments which I consider to be ethical).
Do you? It is all a matter of incentives. When the sky is the limit for executive compensation and we tie it to lagging short term indicators such as stock prices aren’t we incentivizing executives to focus on short term gain at the expense of long term value creation?
Doesn’t this general climate disproportionately advantage the well connected, the insider traders?
And as a citizen of a given jurisdiction, even if you are doing great in the capital markets, is it worth the living in an increasingly enshittified society?
And yet the tolerance for bad decisions is much higher in bigger companies. Make a bad decision at large company and simple intertia will keep you going. Make a bad decision in a small company and you're out of business.
I mean, last November amazon laid off 14k people claiming pandemic over hiring.
Inertia certainly seems to insulate Jassy from ownership
Yes
I understand the co-authors are research fellows at the Maximegalon Institute of Slowly and Painfully Working Out the Surprisingly Obvious
If only it were Surprisingly Obvious. IME there are a large number of emotionally stunted middle and upper managers that could use a pedigreed reminder that being a jerk at work is not good for anything in the end.
Would the people who need such a reminder actually accept the research, and change their behavior?
Are they even aware of the effects of their behavior?
> 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.
This article hits close to home. Recently management provided some 'training' for everybody at where i work, specially focused at team leaders/supervisors, about being courteous based on a training that Disney offers around the world. The focus was not only to be courteous to your end-users, but also to those who you manage and are on your team.
I'm really good at my job, and a few years ago i became a supervisor. But not because i was good with people, simply because i am technically competent. My company was (and still is) rather small (less than 20 on the technical side, but almost 200 overall) and there was no one else remotely apt for the job. I was always a 'cold' person, didn't care much about closeness at work, didn't cared about birthdays, company parties (people absolutely love those where i work, and the company spends a good money on it), and i had to make an effort to remind myself to say 'Good morning' to everybody, because it didn't felt necessary. While i treated everybody with the same respect i wished for myself, eventually i found that that wasn't enough. Fast forward a few years i got better at the basics, but I'm still struggling on the people aspect of it. My team's productivity is good and so is mine, everybody receives good pay and they are happy on that aspect. The only reason to why my team may not have fallen apart, is probably because we still closely interact with other people from other teams, who are way better at this.
> "An easy place to start is simply acknowledging what’s important to people outside of their jobs: birthdays, graduations, marriages, a new baby, death of a loved one, or religious observances. Doing so makes them feel valued as human beings, not just human capital."
For a long time i never considered others would find that important, not at the workplace anyway. When you don't care about that stuff yourself, caring for the sake of work feels fake and people can spot it which may backfire. Is it a case of "fake it until you make it", or just brute-force until you get better on it? I admit it is exhausting. I love my work and what i do on the technical side, and i cannot complain about the company or the pay, but i do sometimes regret accepting that offer.
Sometimes 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.
> the retail chain, which has a well-established policy that managers hand-deliver a card and small gift to each employee on their birthday.
> The faux pas was never intentional; the managers who were late said they had other priorities.
If it's such a well known company policy and you forget that, it is not a small slight at all.
If it’s a known company policy and people know it’s supposed to happen, they’re going to notice when it doesn’t. So it highlights that the managers priorities don’t include you.
Exactly, and even worse, I'm sure the managers remember some people's birthdays.
Conversely, I wonder if employers who feel slighted by those employees, pay and promote them less.
My lived experience in America is that employers often feel slighted by default by their employees, with rare exception. Otherwise they wouldn’t put so many obstacles in the way of paying livable wages for work performed.
That said, half a century of continued slighting of employees is quickly snowballing against them. While I’d hope these studies lead to positive change in the short-term, I doubt anything will move the needle short of mass collective action.
Oranges are orange, tonight at 11…
Lots of “no shit” in these comments makes me wonder how many VP level managers you guys have interacted with. Maybe it’s just my location, but this is one of those things that legitimately NEVER makes it through to upper managers.
When they tell their base managers to crack the whip and force them to give the whole “you are not working hard enough, tighten up. Shorter lunches, clock in 5 minutes early, etc” speech to the base employees, they will absolutely feel resentment and do LESS work, not more.
For more than one reason.
A quite small few will be pushed over the edge and spend their energy trying to find a new position altogether. But the impact of losing them and having an open position for months will have a huge impact. The impact of losing even a below average worker is nearly always underestimated by uppers who see their 200+ indirects as just numbers on an HR chart. And the employees who hop jobs over bad management are usually in the top half of performance, not bottom.
Another handful of over-achievers will realize that their “extra mile” approach is clearly being ignored or not having any effect, and simply become achievers. This alone can have an impact that outweighs any potential gain from whip cracking.
The one thing that nearly all employees will do when this happens though: talk to each other and bitch about it. This will tank morale yes, but it more literally just takes a bunch of time and energy. A very large distraction from the actual work.
I’ve seen this now at several jobs in a few fields. The negative impact is so much larger than I ever would have guessed starting out.
If you want to get more work out of the same workers, you cannot use negative reinforcement. It will backfire. Positive reinforcement is not bulletproof but rarely makes things WORSE.
Manage smarter not harder.
> When they tell their base managers to crack the whip and force them to give the whole “you are not working hard enough, tighten up. Shorter lunches, clock in 5 minutes early, etc” speech to the base employees, they will absolutely feel resentment and do LESS work, not more.
The most influential question from team lead trainings over the years has been: Do you trust your employee to want to complete the task and purpose they have, or do you need to control them? There are a few names for this, Theory X and Theory Y mainly.
And don't be snide and just say that the current economy forces you to work due to wages. A lot of people I know would just create their own creative work if they had all the money in the world. So yeah, I think if you frame a persons job and purpose in the company right, you can trust them to work. This may not work in all industries, but in tech it seems to hold.
An example where this is in my experience a good guidance: Someone starts slipping their metrics, whatever those are. Comes in late, is hard to reach remotely. Naturally they should get slapped with the book right? Nah. If you assume they want to work well, the first question should be: Why, what is going on?
In a lot of cases, there will be something going on in their private life they are struggling with. If you help them with that, or at least help them navigate work around this, you will end up with a great team member.
Like one guy on the team recently had some trouble during the last legs of building a house and needed more flexible time. We could've been strict and told him to punch it and take their entire annual vacation to manage that, even if he just needs to be able to jump away for an hour or two here and there. Instead we made sure to schedule simple work for him and have him work with a higher focus on educating his sidekicks, tracked the total time away and then booked it as 3-4 days at the end. Now it's a fun story in the teams lore they are fond of having navigated that, instead of one guy sulking about having lost all of his vacation in that nonsense.
> In a lot of cases, there will be something going on in their private life they are struggling with. If you help them with that, or at least help them navigate work around this, you will end up with a great team member.
Note that there already has to be a pretty high level of trust between that employee and their manager for this to work; if I don't feel like I can trust my manager, I will absolutely keep my lips zipped about anything not directly work related.
Oh absolutely, and it would be my responsibility to build this. In fact, I don't even need details. I just prefer to know about a team members situation and have a plan around it, before clients, internal customers, our boss and HR start coming knocking with hard questions or worse.
Yup. We just lost our "slightly below average" developers, but he was a nice guy and tries to deliver. But they have been slow to replace him, and now we are likely looking at 3 months before a new hire will just be in place, plus the new hire will not have the three years worth of experience the other guy had, so their project will likely be slower than at it already was for the rest of the year.
I’d take “slightly below average but is generally good to work with and tries hard” over “genius asshole” almost any day. Few projects require the latter.
There’s also the problem with how useless so many are at their jobs with no way to be sure until its too late.
mostly agree but the below average try hard is also the one introducing the most bugs so I'm torn on this.
That very much depends on the workplace. I was let go once for being 'slightly below average', because I kept foolishly spending the time to fix things in ways that didn't result in more bugs.
> I’d take “slightly below average but is generally good to work with and tries hard” over “genius asshole” almost any day.
I'd take either before the utterly dangerous "below average hard-working asshole" which tend to quickly rise to managerial positions and cause untold damage with their ineptitude.
"I distinguish four types. There are clever, hardworking, stupid, and lazy officers. Usually two characteristics are combined. Some are clever and hardworking; their place is the General Staff. The next ones are stupid and lazy; they make up 90 percent of every army and are suited to routine duties. Anyone who is both clever and lazy is qualified for the highest leadership duties, because he possesses the mental clarity and strength of nerve necessary for difficult decisions. One must beware of anyone who is both stupid and hardworking; he must not be entrusted with any responsibility because he will always only cause damage."
— Kurt von Hammerstein-Equord
> When they tell their base managers to crack the whip and force them to give the whole “you are not working hard enough, tighten up. Shorter lunches, clock in 5 minutes early, etc” speech to the base employees, they will absolutely feel resentment and do LESS work, not more.
The bosses with half a brain do this only when the supply of labor is increasing relative to demand for labor. The bet is that the sufficient employees won’t have a choice to find a different job, and people that fail to maintain the new pace can be replaced with newer, and maybe even cheaper employees.
I agree with everything you are saying, but it’s still a “oh well, no shit, Sherlock” research. Coming up next: Water is wet.
As a Brit, the birthday card example feels oddly American. The effect seems plausible, but the UK equivalent slight would be something much more informal
I wonder if this is generationally specific. I'm an American and have zero expectation that anybody at work should acknowledge my birthday.
On the other hand, I can understand feeling slighted if the manager consistently recognizes their employees' birthdays but overlooks mine.
Yes. We needed an essay to crack this one
A good leader believes in the team and the team’s mission.
Celebrating birthdays and milestones are a possible side effect of this, but these celebrations can’t take place of the power of that belief.
If you consistently smile, you can force yourself to be happier, and if you force yourself to celebrate others, that’s still a good thing. But, your team will know if you don’t believe.
You’re better off being Gary Oldman in Slow Horses (only secretly believing in the mission and with a team that all care) than just being in it for the paycheck.
I’m not saying to quit if you can’t believe, but don’t expect top productivity.
This seems obvious but I guess needs 'official research' to register.
A quote I remember from a coleage - 'They wouldn't give me a pay rate rise, so I gave myself one, by working less hours in a day'
Yeah, I think nobody is gonna tell their boss "I did not like the way you treated me, so I will take a day off for feeling slightly sick". So, while it all sounds obvious, the extent of "idgaf then" is not easy to quantify.
It'll never register, lol.
It'll end up being a tick box moment in some Friday after 5 minute management training document that got completed while thinking about what to do over the weekend.
> It'll never register, lol.
Which is why people do it.
You get fired if you just stop showing up on Thursdays, but not if you start reading comics on your phone for the first hour of every workday.
So, 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?"
I wonder if this is true for PhD students
Bad PIs seem to be a real problem.
Luckily I'm self-funded and with good supervisors, so not a problem that I face!
It’s just their roundabout way of complaining about their boss forgetting their birthday.
I just got my annual review and for the 4th year in a row, no changes. I'm still "meeting expectations" but apparently not deserving of even a crumb of the millions in additional profits I've brought in. I am damn sure not going to work as hard going forward when working hard doesn't even lead to a positive outcome. 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?
That 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.
On some level the headline is like "yeah, no shit," but the surprising thing is the claimed strength of the effect. 50% absenteeism increase for missing a birthday congratulations? Really?
I'm now somewhat interested in the study to see how they accounted for possible hidden factors.
If a team lead or manager spent the time to track birthdays and took time out of their day to have a 10 minute chat with someone on their birthday, they probably exhibit a number of other behaviors that could be summarized as "treating their employees as humans". That's the boss people tend to like to work with and possibly go another mile for them.
If tolerating your boss during a normal day takes 9 of your 12 spoons of energy for the day, it takes very little further push to be spiteful. At worst, they may force you to find another workplace with a better boss.
This is a study from an elite institution published in a respectable journal in the social sciences. Certainly they took the time to perform a controlled experiment and assigned managers at random to deliver the birthday cards late or on time. That would be cheap to do and minimally invasive for the human subjects.
[Reads abstract]
They didn't? It's a pure observational study that one measure of sloppiness in the organisation correlates with another? What do we pay these guys for?
Per 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-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.
I don't really mind but I take a slight objection to supposedly confidential data (like birthday) being widely shared even with good intentions.
Birthdays are hardly confidential.
They'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.
They should be unless you want to publish one of the things that too many (eg sites) regard as a reasonable secondary security verifier.
It 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.
Base rate is likely quite low.
From the further linked https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/when-employees-f... -
> "They found the perfect observational setting in the retail chain, which has a well-established policy that managers hand-deliver a card and small gift to each employee on their birthday. The company designed the policy to foster meaningful personal interactions and strengthen the employee-manager relationship"
> "The team found no issues when cards and gifts were given within a five-day window of the employee’s birthday"
Part of me wonders more now if the slight also comes from the expectation of receiving a gift under this policy? If someone told me "hey, happy birthday, dude" that'd be good enough for me.
A surprising effect, who would imagine it?
Thanks professor, my boss didn't believe me when I tried to hint it
Is paying $20 to read this the only option?
Addendum:
Tables from the study available here: https://www.pnas.org/action/downloadSupplement?doi=10.1073%2...
Breaking news: when it rains, people get wet
A lot of work is fake work. It's just social signaling. It's just a game of being liked. Just look at the stats for autistic people who have difficulty finding and maintaining employment, not because they're bad at their actual job but because neurotypical people just don't like them. Anyone who has worked for a remotely large organization has met plenty of people who have been promoted well beyond their actual abilities or output.
In this space you'll often hear about Dunbar's number [1] and the idea that organizations with more than about 150 people tend to break down. In larger organizations, a whole layer of middle management seems to rise up with questionable output. Like you might have no idea who your VP is. One place I worked had the VP visit once a quarter, walk aroudn and ask what people worked on and occasionally yell at them.
The military is an interesting example because it's millions of people, often in confined spaces so a whole bunch of rules have to be created so they don't kill each other, basically. And if you talk to any current or former servicemembers you'll hear stories about how not much gets done there either. Toxic leadership, lots of waiting around for nothing, bureaucracy and so on.
One can view this "research" as "be nice to your employees" but I think it's more nefarious than that. Or at least "be nice" won't be the lesson Corporate America takes from it. Instead it'll be that employees need to be even more closely monitored so they're not slacking off.
I think about what I call "organizational churn". This is where every 6 months you'll get an email saying a VP in your direct chain whom you've likely never met now reports to a different SVP under some restructure or reorganization to "align goals" or for "efficiency".
What you realize after awhile is that organizational churn only exists so nobody is every accountable for their actions or output. They're never in the same place long enough to see the consequences of their action or inaction.
But what I've thought about a lot recently in terms of organization is the Chinese Community Party. Millions of people work for the CCP. Yet it's output has been stunning. Some 40,000km of high speed train lines in 20 years for less than the US spends on the military in one year. Energy projects, metros, bridges, cities, housing, roads, ports, the list goes on.
How does the CCP avoid empire-building, institutional rot and general bureaucratic paralysis?
I think you'd enjoy reading about the Gervais Principle. It's pretty much what you're talking about.
> 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.
how does most academia ever get funding?
yeah why have data when you can just use vibes