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The worst morale-boosting gesture I've experienced

shkspr.mobi

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Re: The worst morale-boosting gesture I've experienced

#91

Post by Balgair »

Someone1234 wrote: post #47

Considering how expensive staff are, I've never understood the culture surrounding penny pinching the stuff that would keep them happy/improve moral/improve retention. Forget the moral arguments for a second, even in purely financial terms it would likely pay for itself in recruitment savings alone, let alone brain drain/efficiency, training costs, and so on. Even a "cheap" employee in a white collar job, is likely c…

I'm always reminded of the addage: "The elves are leaving middle earth" when it comes to such penny pinching: https://steveblank.com/2009/12/21/the-elves-leave-middle-ear...

Re: The worst morale-boosting gesture I've experienced

#92

Post by pwodhouse »

John Oliver did a segment explaining how Murray Coal gave people bonus checks as low as $3 for dodging safety policies to mine more coal, and said "they can void their checks if they don't want the bonuses". Some miners mailed the checks back voided with "Eat Shit Bob Murray" on them.

Re: The worst morale-boosting gesture I've experienced

#93

Post by corodra »

protomyth wrote: post #55
1121redblackgo wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I really stretched my imagination, maybe 'She's worked so hard and did so well for our company, maybe she deserves to take a nice vacation, here's the most popular book for women to symbolize that'.

You are putting a bit too much thought into the decision making. I figure someone walked into the book store and picked the book from the first bestseller display. Never attribute to malice or ignorance what can adequately explained by lazy.

Yea, people do this all the time with kids too. They pick up the first thing that's either popular or they see as "child appropriate". It's just laziness. It's not hard to think adults do it to other adults. Especially if they think the whole thing is pointless to begin with.

Re: The worst morale-boosting gesture I've experienced

#94

Post by HelloNurse »

Someone1234 wrote: post #47

Considering how expensive staff are, I've never understood the culture surrounding penny pinching the stuff that would keep them happy/improve moral/improve retention. Forget the moral arguments for a second, even in purely financial terms it would likely pay for itself in recruitment savings alone, let alone brain drain/efficiency, training costs, and so on. Even a "cheap" employee in a white collar job, is likely c…

Prioritizing penny-pinching in general over being nice to people in general is an easy temptation for entrepreneurs, and it goes well with generic egoism.

For example, I'm used to more or less annual all-hands dinners at inadequate restaurants, with better wine for the partners (all sitting together, of course) and combined with partners-only yacht weekends and the like.

Re: The worst morale-boosting gesture I've experienced

#95

Post by sigstoat »

* got a $6 christmas bonus one year. (they did a percentage across that board, and i was working very little.)

* coupon for $10 off a turkey on more than one occasion

* enormous bowl of candy left out for everyone to get fat on. when employees complained that we didn't appreciate a constant supply of candy, CEO whined about how he was giving us "free food" and we were complaining.

* two different employers have decided that they needed to paint a bunch of fancy accent walls. they then get budget painters to put a single sloppy coat of cheap paint over the professionally painted office-wall-grey. ends up looking pitiful.

Re: The worst morale-boosting gesture I've experienced

#96

Post by pwodhouse »

itronitron wrote: post #54
lazyasciiart wrote: post #14

My younger sister received an award for being a promising new grad or something in her first year at one of the Big 4 accounting companies. Her prize? A public ceremony where a senior manager handed her a copy of 50 Shades of Grey.......

Somewhere down that path one of the executive admins should have put the brakes on that particular book purchase. The fact that they didn't says something about the company. If she was the only person that received 50 Shades and other people received different books then that is an obvious case of harassment.

Sometimes the admins will let a horrible decision be realized because they want the decision makers to face the consequences.

Or maybe there's another 50 SoG book that about suits for accountants.

Or they confused 50SoG with Lean In, another book about women getting ahead in the corporate world

Re: The worst morale-boosting gesture I've experienced

#97

Post by corodra »

eli wrote: post #65
protomyth wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are putting a bit too much thought into the decision making. I figure someone walked into the book store and picked the book from the first bestseller display. Never attribute to malice or ignorance what can adequately explained by lazy.

It is very common for abusive people to exploit this attitude and commit acts that are clearly over the line but have some barely plausible innocent explanation. Gaslighting the victim is, perhaps, another intentional part of the abuse. You'd have to work pretty hard to convince me that gifting a young woman a sexually explicit novel is not malicious.

I didn't know 50 Shades of Grey was erotica until the movie trailers started hitting TV.

Most guys had no clue about the book other than thinking it was a straight forward romance book. I could make the same claims against other people about how they can't tell the difference between spam and real emails or ad results and real results. I know because I'm consistently around it and I HAVE to know. It takes a level of maturity to understand that everyone else doesn't know what you may know.

Re: The worst morale-boosting gesture I've experienced

#98

Post by pwodhouse »

eli wrote: post #65
protomyth wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are putting a bit too much thought into the decision making. I figure someone walked into the book store and picked the book from the first bestseller display. Never attribute to malice or ignorance what can adequately explained by lazy.

It is very common for abusive people to exploit this attitude and commit acts that are clearly over the line but have some barely plausible innocent explanation. Gaslighting the victim is, perhaps, another intentional part of the abuse. You'd have to work pretty hard to convince me that gifting a young woman a sexually explicit novel is not malicious.

Depends on when. When the book first came out and Amazon did TV ads about moms in the bathtub reading it, I just thought it was a random popular chick lit book.

Re: The worst morale-boosting gesture I've experienced

#99

Post by Veen »

eli wrote: post #65
protomyth wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are putting a bit too much thought into the decision making. I figure someone walked into the book store and picked the book from the first bestseller display. Never attribute to malice or ignorance what can adequately explained by lazy.

It is very common for abusive people to exploit this attitude and commit acts that are clearly over the line but have some barely plausible innocent explanation. Gaslighting the victim is, perhaps, another intentional part of the abuse. You'd have to work pretty hard to convince me that gifting a young woman a sexually explicit novel is not malicious.

It was also a book that was enormously popular among women. At that time, if you were to randomly choose a book from the best-seller list, there’s a good chance you’d land on Shades of Grey.

Re: The worst morale-boosting gesture I've experienced

#100

Post by Swinx43 »

athenot wrote: post #18
lazyasciiart wrote: post #14

My younger sister received an award for being a promising new grad or something in her first year at one of the Big 4 accounting companies. Her prize? A public ceremony where a senior manager handed her a copy of 50 Shades of Grey.......

This sounds like something straight out of the TV show The Office. Goes to show that reality is often more extreme than fiction.

Or House of Lies. That show was way closer to the truth about consulting than most would care to admit.
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