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The worst morale-boosting gesture I've experienced

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

#281

Post by euler_angles »

rsweeney21 wrote: post #146
fatnoah wrote: post #132

Oh, man, don't get me started. Two short ones: I did a stint in professional services and billed for 2600 hours @ $250/hr for a total of $650k. Essentially worked 12+ hour days for a year, and got a bonus of $1000 before taxes. I quit within a month. Next up was an appreciation gesture where we were thanked for all of our extra hard work with a pack of "Extra" gum and a delivery of baked potatoes (with all the fixing…

Most of the developers at my company (www.facetdev.com) are contract, but for the few full-timers we still have, we used to ask the team to work long hours out of the goodness of their hearts if a project needed it. That seemed wrong, so I implemented a bonus plan where you get paid 60% of everything you bill over your weekly goals and made working extra hours optional. I love writing those bonus checks!

So you ask people to work overtime at a discount to their normal rate?

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

#282

Post by LyndsySimon »

GlenTheMachine wrote: post #203
tssva wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Besides the overtime everything else would be part of the job you were being paid to do. As a federal employee depending on your job classification you were paid either 1.5x your salary or 1.5x the salary of a GS-10 Step 1 adjusted for your locality for the overtime. Most likely in private industry you would be a salaried employee and not have received overtime pay or a bonus which exceeds what you received in overti…

Maybe they are to uniformed members of the military. I've never once seen a civilian use, display, carry, or talk about a challenge coin. They typically get thrown in the back of a desk drawer and forgotten about. We literally have no use for them whatsoever. They don't even make good paperweights. I have a stack of fourteen of them. Most of them I was given for spending thirty minutes giving some random officer a to…

I’d say most “gun nuts” at least know what they are. They’re not that obscure.

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

#283

Post by BonesJustice »

hinkley wrote: post #186
7402 wrote: post #71

At the end of a project death-march (at one point I turned in a >100 hour timecard), the division director had a celebratory thank-you dinner for all the managers involved in the project. My direct supervisor was at first puzzled as to why I wasn't coming with him to the dinner at the end of the day, and then he was quite appalled - I think he later had words with the director about the whole thing.

I'd bet money that most of those managers weren't even in the building for most of that death march. I have a standing rule. If I work overtime it's because I fucked up. I said something would be done by Friday but I goofed off, I'll work. If I'm working nights and weekends for business reasons, then my manager is in the building the entire time. A lot of them tone down their rhetoric when you make them put skin in t…

I have the same rule. If I’m expected to come in on the weekend, my manager had better be there. If it’s important enough to ask me to sacrifice my personal time, then it had better be important enough for him to be there too.

Unless it’s because I screwed up and need to fix something post haste. In which case, he won’t have to ask me at all.

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

#284

Post by thaumasiotes »

StavrosK wrote: post #34

We need to find a name for a gesture so small in its generosity that it ends up being offensive. No bonus would have left me disappointed, but a $50 bonus would have made me angry. Like when Delta gave a food voucher to make up for a 5-hour delay on a 30-minute file. The voucher was for $3. Fuck Delta.

> a gesture so small in its generosity that it ends up being offensive. No bonus would have left me disappointed, but a $50 bonus would have made me angry.

This is basically how I felt about the Amazon employee discount program, which if I remember right was 10% off all purchases, capped at $100 / year.

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

#285

Post by Havoc »

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.

Admins at big 4 do as they’re told unless its against an actual policy for the most part

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

#287

Post by thaumasiotes »

corodra wrote: post #97
eli wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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.

These are not compatible sentences. Romance novels are erotica.

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

#288

Post by owenmarshall »

nothrabannosir wrote: post #241
x2f10 wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's a good way to go about this?

Get a competing job offer. Whatever they offer you, ask for a comparable raise of your current workplace. Be very explicit about it being non-negotiable. Whether to mention the competing job offer is a matter of taste; it helps prove you mean business, but it can damage trust. Either way: if they say no you leave. This only works if, and because , you are ready to walk away. It's the easiest form of negotiating. But…

This strategy works extremely well if you are actually underpaid, and if you are you might not need that offer at all: I once bluffed my way into a 16% raise that was issued on the spot.

This is not a success story - it only worked because I was an incredibly poor negotiator and signed on for at least 20% under my market value.

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

#290

Post by bumby »

Nexxxeh wrote: post #195
gameswithgo wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A challenge coin! Are people who tend to run companies total children, or do they think that those of us working for them are children?

I think it's more a cultural thing. Not everyone is financially motivated, they want the recognition. A challenge coin is a tool for doing that. It's in a similar vein to a medal. It might have been misjudged in this instance however, but they're a thing in military circles so I can imagine how it seemed like a good idea. Tbh I'd have been really pleased, but I can appreciate that's not universal.

Public can be difficult to award people without running afoul of ethics rules. You're suprisingly constrained on what, and to what extent, you can award with congressionally appropriated funds. Sometimes people just eschew the whole idea because it's so difficult.
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