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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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'

> "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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

All of the above is sarcastic for those who find it difficult to pick up on tone in text.

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.

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.

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.

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?"

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

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.