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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

#221

Post by iainmerrick »

jedberg wrote: post #201
HarryHirsch wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you get let go, they ask in the exit interview if you were warned Why would anyone give any kind of useful information in the exit interview? The only one who benefits is the company, they need to cover their back in case a suit over harassment comes up. If anyone wants revenge over poor management, keep silent, let the fellow continue to lose the company money and set them up for a lawsuit. HR is not on your si…

That's a very cynical view. While the company may not be on your side, helping your coworkers by proving feedback about bad management is a good thing. Also, why would you want the company to fail? Just because they have one bad manager? My friends still work there, and if you have stock options, you even have a financial interest in the continued success of the company. I see no downside in providing truthful feedba…

The context being described is one in which you were just sacked at the whim of a manager. Doesn’t it seem a little funny to wait until the exit interview to ask if it came as a surprise? Maybe they’re going to act in that information somehow, perhaps sacking that manager if it’s part of a pattern of poor decisions, but they’re not planning on doing anything to help you personally, like overturning the dismissal.

Maybe you’re inclined to help them out just to be a good person, and that’s fine; but I don’t blame anyone who doesn’t want to do that.

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

#222

Post by RotANobot »

cpeterso wrote: post #127
yreg wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I heard about a call center that rewarded customer service agents for short calls, so workers started immediately hanging up on some calls to bring their average call duration down.

> I heard about a call center that rewarded customer service agents for short calls

Almost all call centres reward agents for short calls.

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

#223

Post by mynameisvlad »

giantg2 wrote: post #157
fbanon9876 wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I felt similarly, earlier in my career. Until a manager explained it this way: "Suppose you make the greatest thing in the world, but nobody knows about it. Wouldn't it be better to have spent 95% of the effort on making a slightly inferior product, and 5% to actually get people to use it? Isn't it more impactful to make something people use? Well, in order to get people to use anything, you have to talk about it."

Thats a cop out by a lazy or self-centered manager. The difference is that it's the manager's job to evaluate you vs marketing a product to an unknown buyer. A good manager would actively work with their employees to know what is going on. Most managers I've seen care about their own performance and hitting target metrica. If you're not good a marketing a product, you should still spend 100% of your effort on making…

This only works for external products. People make internal tools all the time that can be used by many teams. You're not going to get a marketing person to market the tool internally, that's wasted money.

At that point, it's really your and your manager's (and so forth) responsibility to ensure your product or tool is in the right hands and helps people.

My manager was great at taking on some of the burdens and shielding me from above, while still giving me the flexibility and incentive to work with other teams and people to make sure I was the one everyone recognized for the work done, as opposed to the team or him.

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

#224

Post by twodave »

skapadia wrote: post #200

There should be a systematic way to collect and periodically highlight accomplishments and those who contributed to those (quarterly, monthly). A lead should be able to produce that information (with input from the team, all in one room face to face), and it should be published in a common place (where everyone else has read-only rights, or changes can be tracked) for managers and higher-ups to see.

I think I'm going to disagree with this. I've seen lots of these systems foisted upon employees and the general result is people either try to game the system or else people feel forced into participating when they don't wish to. Praise ought to be both spontaneous and merited or else it loses a bit of its appeal in my opinion.

Thanks to this article (which I didn't even read), I was inspired to write something heartfelt to my own manager about another person on my team. No system would have pried that from me. I just needed a subtle reminder.

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

#225

Post by scaryclam »

beefield wrote: post #116
opportune wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Constructive feedback and most other negative feedback is really aspirational at the company level. It sounds good for HR to try to say it’s a company “value” and to encode it in reviews. In reality it’s never ever worth it to give constructive feedback to peers or upward (downward is OK). It’s bad for social dynamics, cohesion, and morale, especially when it’s formalized as part of some review process. It’s essentia…

Is there a company that consists of people that actually are willing and interested in getting "constructive feedback"? Basically I think that it would mean that the people are so intereted in the quality of the work they are doing that anything that might make their work better is interesting even if it turns out they have done something "wrong" earlier. If there is , I might considering applying at some point. I as…

The company I work at has this culture. Feedback is valued greatly, not just at review time, but regularly. I've had people who report to me tell me that they think I was wrong or that they would like me to do things differently, and vice versa. The trick is to build trust and understand that when something's negative, it's from a place of care, not malice. We all want each other to grow, to get better and to keep being great in areas that don't need any work. It sounds cheesy, but it's true.

Hands down the best company I've worked for and I hope that other companies can do the same. It is indeed refreshing to be able to hear/say "Hey, you know, actually there is a much better/nicer/less stupid/more efficient way to do what you are doing" and be sure that it's not going to be taken badly.

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

#226

Post by meej »

BurningFrog wrote: post #104
vidarh wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. This is why wages are secret. Everyone is convinced they deserve to be in the top half of earners.

Businesses want wages to be secret and may even adopt policies that ban employees from discussing it, but in the U.S. employees' rights to discuss pay amongst themselves are protected under the NLRA.

https://www.insperity.com/blog/when-employees-discuss-wages/

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

#227

Post by WWLink »

jedberg wrote: post #107
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…

This is what I loved about working at Netflix. We didn't have performance reviews. It was assumed that your performance was good to excellent, otherwise you wouldn't be working there anymore. You had a constant feedback loop with your manager on performance, but nothing was ever formal. Raises were completely divorced from any performance assessment. You were paid whatever they thought the max was for your skillset,…

Geez that sounds exactly like how the place I work at works. Interesting!

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

#228

Post by GEBBL »

beefield wrote: post #116
opportune wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Constructive feedback and most other negative feedback is really aspirational at the company level. It sounds good for HR to try to say it’s a company “value” and to encode it in reviews. In reality it’s never ever worth it to give constructive feedback to peers or upward (downward is OK). It’s bad for social dynamics, cohesion, and morale, especially when it’s formalized as part of some review process. It’s essentia…

Is there a company that consists of people that actually are willing and interested in getting "constructive feedback"? Basically I think that it would mean that the people are so intereted in the quality of the work they are doing that anything that might make their work better is interesting even if it turns out they have done something "wrong" earlier. If there is , I might considering applying at some point. I as…

I am the OP and the way this normally works is that we would speak out if someone did something in the wrong way, for example a step in a process was forgotten. It’s better to step in (ha) and help out and make the suggestion of how to fix it.

But to write out constructive feedback which goes against your colleagues record, so that they have to show how they received this feedback and the steps they did to remedy it, seems a bit much.

For example, how do I know that a certain piece of feedback might be really difficult/impossible for you to fix and then you lose out on a %age salary increase or promotion because of it?

I can’t write ‘mr x could really work on coming to work earlier’, as that’s not my job. What if I write ‘mr x. would have been better to use x pattern in his development because ...’, as that would mean I have oversight of how they are doing their work and I haven’t spoken up in time. Which seems crazy.

If you are doing something wrong or something that can be improved, I would prefer to tell you point in time, and when the context is right.

To leave ‘constructive feedback’ against your personal record removes a lot of context, and has the potential to damage your career and our relationship.

I don’t like it!

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

#229

Post by marcosdumay »

xvector wrote: post #145
sleepydog wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, but in the specific case of Netflix, people are let go all the time , and managers have a lot of authority to make the decision to fire someone. Tenure doesn't matter, either -- you could work there for 6 years and end up getting fired when you get a new manager or the existing one decides you're phoning it in.

That's a massive amount of trust placed in managers. I've had asshole managers before that didn't have this much power thanks to company structure. Honestly I would never work at a place like this. Maybe it's lean and efficient for the company, but it definitely doesn't sound fun for the employee.

On the other hand, I'm sure those bad managers get the natural result of their management much quicker and more visibly when there is no bureaucractic structure protecting them from themselves.
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