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When your coworker does great work, tell their manager

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Re: When your coworker does great work, tell their manager

#81

Post by vidarh »

duxup wrote: post #27
AceyMan wrote: post #8

I worked for the airlines (first career) and for public-facing employees it was a big deal if you got a 'good letter' from a customer. (It was equally suck if you happened to get a bad one...). We also could file 'thank you / attaboy' paperwork for our colleagues, both in our own department or ones we interacted with. Those were just as valuable (if not more) than ones from the customers. Over the years (11) during m…

Ages ago when I did basic PC support we had a "attaboy" system. The thing about it was nobody liked it because attaboys were random. They had nothing to do with doing a good job or anything, they showed up randomly. Most of the time "attaboys" showed up for doing the absolute most basic thing that is part of the job. You do it every day... but randomly an "attaboy" shows up, because by the roll of the dice you helped…

It can be extremely demoralising for co-workers in all kinds of roles when they see that kind of recognition being given to someone who they feel don't deserve it.

Personally I think it's risky to acknowledge these kind of things in front of a team for that reason unless it's better quantified. I've personally as well been in situations where

I've been outright resentful because the recognition of someone I knew was doing a bad job made it clear we could not expect recognition based on merits, and so what was the point of putting in the effort?

Re: When your coworker does great work, tell their manager

#82

Post by amznthrowaway5 »

giantg2 wrote: post #73
shahbaby wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to be this stupid too but then I learned that it's better to just play their game, win and then move on, no point in fighting it, just think of it as another part of the job.

I want to, but I find the lying and mind games to be morally offensive, especially when they can have such a large impact on a person's wellbeing.

This is my problem as well, and seeing all of the unfair behavior -- with average performers who are easy targets getting PIPed while the lowest performers who are the managers favorites get top ranks or promotions -- is really annihilating my morale.

Re: When your coworker does great work, tell their manager

#83

Post by toast0 »

opportune wrote: post #33
ping_pong wrote: post #17

This is the biggest problem with stack ranking software engineers, the practice I had to endure while at a well known software company. All it does is create a zero-sum game, so I have no incentive to compliment anyone else. I needed to make sure that my rank was as high as I could make it, which really sucked during performance time. It was very stressful, even though I was a high performer, because it didn't foster…

After experiencing this myself I’m beginning to think the best performance management system is one that is as “holistic” and loosely defined as possible. Probably doesn’t work at scale (since every director will be happy to spend as much of the company’s money as possible to retain employees) but seems to be better than OKR/tenure/stack ranked bullshit, even with the potential confounding variables like nepotism

You need to set the directors' budgets somehow. But hopefully there's not so many directors, and company leadership can figure that out. Then let the directors do whatever within that, with light supervision (company CYA of course, but also to make sure things are fair enough within the overall company, etc).

Re: When your coworker does great work, tell their manager

#84

Post by giantg2 »

allenu wrote: post #66
shahbaby wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to be this stupid too but then I learned that it's better to just play their game, win and then move on, no point in fighting it, just think of it as another part of the job.

This is what I do now after trying and failing at "doing my best work and hoping to get recognized". I'm bad at communicating when I've worked on something challenging, so now I realize I should never give more effort than can be noticed. You may think that's cynical, but this is a business and I'm paid not on what I actually do but what the business perceives me of doing.

Thanks! I might look into trying that mindset.

Re: When your coworker does great work, tell their manager

#85

Post by Cerium »

yreg wrote: post #70
ar_lan wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Humans have proven time and time again that we are very good at optimizing for specific metrics, and apparently generally very poor at choosing the right metrics to target. School is a prime example, in my opinion - there is so much I "learned" in school that I'll never remember, because I didn't take a proper approach to learning - I just optimized for grades. I had a 4.7 GPA and could hardly tell you a thing about…

Planet Money had an episode on such metrics[0] The host shares a personal story from time when he was a cashier. The grocery chain measured performance as items scanned per minute and shared internal leaderboard. Some items are hard to scan so the cashiers ended up skipping scanning them – so the store gave them away for free. But the managers were happy about their KPIs. (Look how many items are we suddenly selling…

Costco has such leader boards and keeps a separate board for part timers vs full time cashiers. I asked my friend who works there why the part time cashiers have a much higher (upwards of 2x) items per minute rate than the full time employees. Costco only schedules part time cashiers during busy hours where the lines are long and there are assistants getting the carts ready.

Re: When your coworker does great work, tell their manager

#86

Post by price »

fblp wrote: post #47

I feel like the main point should be "if your coworker does great work, tell them". Be curious, see if they have feedback through you, see how they'd like to be recognized. That step is often missed. People are often resistant to providing direct feedback - yet that is also how the strongest bonds are made. The more a manager acts as an intermediary, the less direct emotional (and consequently professional) relations…

You may not have read the article. It says to tell the coworker first. There is no question of a manager acting as an intermediary.

The point of telling the manager is to help the coworker get their next raise or promotion, not for the manager to be the one to tell them.

Re: When your coworker does great work, tell their manager

#87

Post by teachrdan »

jedimastert wrote: post #16
jkubrynski wrote: post #9

From my experience, especially in big companies (but not only) most of the feedback is negative. People are not sharing positive feedback, and when they contact your manager it's usually an escalation process. That's why it's so important to reach to people who support you or simply create a content you like (blog posts, webinars, etc) and say: "thanks, I found a lot of value here".

> That's why it's so important to reach to people who support you or simply create a content you like (blog posts, webinars, etc) and say: "thanks, I found a lot of value here". I've been trying to start up a blog this year (three posts in 7 months, woo!) and someone recently contacted me to tell me that my RSS feed was down and they didn't want to miss the next post. It carried me into the next week it meant so much…

I had a radio show in college (low power station, small college town) and a friend of a friend told me that, when he listened to the show while delivering pizza, he'd sprint to and from the customer's door so he could get as much of the show as possible. This was about the highest praise I could think of.

Re: When your coworker does great work, tell their manager

#88

Post by [deleted] »

oblio wrote: post #53
ping_pong wrote: post #17

This is the biggest problem with stack ranking software engineers, the practice I had to endure while at a well known software company. All it does is create a zero-sum game, so I have no incentive to compliment anyone else. I needed to make sure that my rank was as high as I could make it, which really sucked during performance time. It was very stressful, even though I was a high performer, because it didn't foster…

> well known software company named...? :-)

[deleted]

Re: When your coworker does great work, tell their manager

#89

Post by opportune »

mark-wagner wrote: post #75
oblio wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> well known software company named...? :-)

Until November 2013 Microsoft used stack ranking.

Doesn’t Microsoft, as well as almost all other large software companies, still do almost the same thing by having a fixed distribution of ratings that needs to be met under some organizational unit? IE under each director of 100 people you have 5 A+, 25 A, 30 B, 30 C, 5 D, 5F?

Re: When your coworker does great work, tell their manager

#90

Post by duxup »

vidarh wrote: post #81
duxup wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ages ago when I did basic PC support we had a "attaboy" system. The thing about it was nobody liked it because attaboys were random. They had nothing to do with doing a good job or anything, they showed up randomly. Most of the time "attaboys" showed up for doing the absolute most basic thing that is part of the job. You do it every day... but randomly an "attaboy" shows up, because by the roll of the dice you helped…

It can be extremely demoralising for co-workers in all kinds of roles when they see that kind of recognition being given to someone who they feel don't deserve it. Personally I think it's risky to acknowledge these kind of things in front of a team for that reason unless it's better quantified. I've personally as well been in situations where I've been outright resentful because the recognition of someone I knew was…

A while back I thought I had read something that indicated that merit based recognition was often a point of contention.

But random rewards, that were acknowledged to be random actually raised morale across the board, even among those who didn't get it.

The 'reasons' and so forth are often a big deal to people.

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