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.
https://www.personneltoday.com/hr/hmrc-worker-sent-birthday-...
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.
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'
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.
Luckily I'm self-funded and with good supervisors, so not a problem that I face!
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.
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.
There’s also the problem with how useless so many are at their jobs with no way to be sure until its too late.
Tables from the study available here: https://www.pnas.org/action/downloadSupplement?doi=10.1073%2...
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.
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.
Inertia certainly seems to insulate Jassy from ownership
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
> "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.
On the other hand, I can understand feeling slighted if the manager consistently recognizes their employees' birthdays but overlooks mine.
> 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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
blurbleblurble•1h ago