21–30 of 49 posts
Don't know about you all, but recognition at the workplace - the company wide email with good start types, not the direct feedback types - has always felt insincere and manufactured to me.
To that, I agree - bonuses are an abstract measure of the value you provide, coupling it with specific praise from your peers enhances your validation.
I feel this piece may have been written by someone at a C level position who has forgotten or not been in touch with regular workers for a long time. Is this just their validation to avoid compensating well performing individuals? Don't know about you all, but recognition at the workplace - the company wide email with good start types, not the direct feedback types - has always felt insincere and manufactured to me.
They aren’t mutually exclusive. I’ve worked at a large company that allowed peers to give small, cash bonuses to other engineers.
I feel this piece may have been written by someone at a C level position who has forgotten or not been in touch with regular workers for a long time. Is this just their validation to avoid compensating well performing individuals? Don't know about you all, but recognition at the workplace - the company wide email with good start types, not the direct feedback types - has always felt insincere and manufactured to me.
To the first point, 100%, the section about "extra zeroes in your bank account" is super tone deaf.
Maybe I would feel differently if I was an investor / entrepreneur / thinker and not a simple, if well compensated, peasant.
Pay is actually the most honest recognition and motivator.
I'd say continuous pay. If it's your job and you're good enough to keep it, your continuous pay check is just the agreed upon exchange for doing said work. If you're not good enough, then that pay stops (or you're promoted to management). If you do something above and beyond expected for job, then bonuses are what is used to reward. Sure, some peer recognition or other non-monetary award might be appropriate for cert…
I get that it's culturally difficult to lower salaries so companies don't feel comfortable paying very large salaries as they'll never be able to reduce them in lean years.
Bonuses/RSUs/etc seem like perfectly reasonable ways to pay people what they deserve without paying unsustainable high salaries that are very difficult to ever decrease if times get tough or if high performance is no longer achieved.
I feel this piece may have been written by someone at a C level position who has forgotten or not been in touch with regular workers for a long time. Is this just their validation to avoid compensating well performing individuals? Don't know about you all, but recognition at the workplace - the company wide email with good start types, not the direct feedback types - has always felt insincere and manufactured to me.
I read a piece years ago that said the only true signal of recognition in business is money: everything else is just sentiment. Good wishes will not pay your bills or feed your family.
Bosses: if you really want to recognise good work, pay a bonus, or give a salary bump. Stock can also be a viable option, but everything else is simply fluff.
Money makes a difference. Money is what the business is about, and what I give you my time for. Not pitty, not trying to compensate for parental approval issues, not strokings to my ego. Money that I can then exchange for goods and services.
> For the majority of us out there, having a lot of zeros in your bank account balance brings little satisfaction if no one else knows it.
A nice vacation in Mexico with my family brings me a lot of satisfaction, and not because I tell my coworkers about it.
(I won't quote any sources because we're talking opinions)
It's also deeply ingrained with cultural biases, such as "flaunting it" (which is highly normalized in places like Hong Kong or Singapore, but would be a lot more frowned upon in some European places, for example).
My personal 2c is that I have a ton of "recognition" at work. It feels extremely hollow when a VP is "celebrating" what a great job my team has done and yet has no idea what we've done (other than "have satisfied customers"). Words are cheap to me. Might be just me.
Personal recognition is very different (e.g. a colleague saying "wow, I'd have never thought of this workaround") but that has nothing to do with salary or compensation.