Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

When employees feel slighted, they work less

penntoday.upenn.edu

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

221–230 of 279 posts

Re: When employees feel slighted, they work less

#221

Post by sensanaty »

andsoitis wrote: post #144
SkyeCA wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People are emotional and react in unexpected ways to even the smallest perceived slights, myself included. A late birthday recognition might not feel important, but if one already feels like management doesn't care about them? I can easily seeing that as a confirmation of it that causes resentment. I can also see it doing the same for any number of management related issues. I can tell you personally that the action…

> being denied a bereavement day because the official policy was to only allow one I think when setting up policy like this you have two choices: a) have a fixed number of days --> fair, objective b) allow it to the manager to use their judgement --> variance across company The former has the tradeoff that you experienced.

Or I mean, just treat people as human beings and let them deal with family emergencies? I'm in the Netherlands and I don't think I've ever had a manager that would say anything other than "Take all the time you need" (and genuinely meant it) for a family member who either died or is in hospital/got injured etc. I'm sure there's a minuscule chance of someone abusing this by lying, but I find that if you don't treat people like shit in the first place, they're not gonna lie about stuff like this.

Re: When employees feel slighted, they work less

#222

Post by randycupertino »

yunwal wrote: post #109
tarkin2 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have we got to the point where we need an article telling us that slighting people doesn't help their motivation? Perhaps the answer is yes when we also compare a worker's motivation to a dog's motivation seemingly without irony.

The top-level comment was being ironic. To explain the joke, the employees are withholding the reward of hard work from the employer because the employer behaved badly (by slighting them in some way).

I have an example of this that happened to me:

I received a referral bonus and where the company payroll made an error and accidentally gave me a higher bonus per the level of employee my referral reward was (they set it to the bonus level for a VP and she was a Sr. Director). So unbeknownst to me they gave me $5000 extra in my bonus that should have been only $3000, not $8k. Accounting figured this out next tax season, so then they informed me the would be clawing their error overpayment back had, which apparently is legal. Thus the $5k was taken out of my next paycheck. Their error was not my fault!

I was really annoyed and basically stopped going above and beyond for that company the rest of the year. :-/

It just seemed very petty and reactionary of them for something that was their error originally. This messed up my budget and suddenly having $5k less 9 months later that I hadn't anticipated was a bit of an unforeseen financial hardship. Also she had been my 5th referral to date that they'd hired!!

The whole thing was very demoralizing.

Re: When employees feel slighted, they work less

#223

Post by darth_avocado »

zemvpferreira wrote: post #175
darth_avocado wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whether people like to admit it or not, very rarely do people work for anything but money and career advancement. You can claim you work for passion, the love of the game or whatever 100 other reasons people tend to give out. All it takes is 2 years of no raises and a couple of promotions for colleagues for you to start not wanting to work for whatever reason you convinced yourself you were working for.

I find a lot of people work at a certain place for the social life, and the money comes second. Including some surprisingly high performers.

The only reason money comes second is because they’re paid enough. And even with enough money, like I said, two years without a raise while everyone else gets it, suddenly social life isn’t going to be that important.

Re: When employees feel slighted, they work less

#224

Post by reactordev »

peacebeard wrote: post #212
reactordev wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes the best managers are the ones that aren’t emotionally vested and just expect the work to be done right. You don’t have to be anyone but yourself. You don’t have to change who you are simply because you’re a manager now. You can simply continue being you. Allow those under you to be them. The hardest part of management is managing up.

“They don’t pay you to be perfect, they pay you to be yourself.” -Ted Lasso

Keep meaning to watch that series

Re: When employees feel slighted, they work less

#225

Post by furyofantares »

leothekim wrote: post #9

I understand the co-authors are research fellows at the Maximegalon Institute of Slowly and Painfully Working Out the Surprisingly Obvious

Sure, the headline of the article that's summarizing the study is obvious

Is this obvious?

> The study finds that when managers at a national retail chain failed to deliver birthday greetings on time, it resulted in a 50% increase in absenteeism and a reduction of more than two working hours per month.

Unfortunately it seems like it costs $20 to access the actual paper but I'm guessing it's more interesting than your snark warrants.

Re: When employees feel slighted, they work less

#226

Post by furyofantares »

leothekim wrote: post #9

I understand the co-authors are research fellows at the Maximegalon Institute of Slowly and Painfully Working Out the Surprisingly Obvious

Sure, the headline of the article that's summarizing the study is obvious

Is this obvious?

> The study finds that when managers at a national retail chain failed to deliver birthday greetings on time, it resulted in a 50% increase in absenteeism and a reduction of more than two working hours per month.

Unfortunately it seems like it costs $20 to access the actual paper but I'm guessing it's more interesting than your snark warrants. I mean, maybe. Maybe it's a bad study too, who knows.

Re: When employees feel slighted, they work less

#227

Post by KaiserPro »

SkyeCA wrote: post #122
andsoitis wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> late birthday recognition. if someone is going to feel slighted and similar things add up to them working less, they probably are not a great colleague to begin with. What matters more are: assignment to rewarding work, get paid top dollar, not be bored, get recognition for success, coaching on career growth, given leeway to make mistakes, not overlooked for promotion, etc. Now, as a people manager, if you're not s…

People are emotional and react in unexpected ways to even the smallest perceived slights, myself included. A late birthday recognition might not feel important, but if one already feels like management doesn't care about them? I can easily seeing that as a confirmation of it that causes resentment. I can also see it doing the same for any number of management related issues. I can tell you personally that the action…

> People are emotional and react in unexpected ways to even the smallest perceived slights, myself included

Most people react quite predictably to slights. The issue is, if you don't have enough context, you might not understand you are slighting someone.

I think the biggest problem in the workplace is that those higher up, or more successful in a company will put more stock in following the company rules/culture than making sure someone is ok.

Your point about bereavement leave is a good case in point, I had a similar incident where my manager at the time said "Well your aunt's not your close family is she?" when I asked to attend a funeral. I told HR and they went wide-eyed and silent for a bit before ushering me to the comfy seat while they tore a bollock off my manager. Had they not done that, I think I probably would have rage quit.

But why would my manager think that this would be a rational thing to do? Did she thing that one day would mean I delivered a critical project on time (no, I was a junior) My manager made a judgement that it would be fine to reject a bereavement leave.

The point is, now that I am manager, I make sure that my underlings are and feel cared for. The short term productivity for being a prick to them will evaporate in days. If I can't do something for them, or allow them to do something, I say I can't and why.

Am I a great manager? no, because I'm not really organised. But my team work well despite me, rather than because of me.

Re: When employees feel slighted, they work less

#228

Post by hnaccount_rng »

randycupertino wrote: post #222
yunwal wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The top-level comment was being ironic. To explain the joke, the employees are withholding the reward of hard work from the employer because the employer behaved badly (by slighting them in some way).

I have an example of this that happened to me: I received a referral bonus and where the company payroll made an error and accidentally gave me a higher bonus per the level of employee my referral reward was (they set it to the bonus level for a VP and she was a Sr. Director). So unbeknownst to me they gave me $5000 extra in my bonus that should have been only $3000, not $8k. Accounting figured this out next tax seas…

I love that example. It’s a basic exercise in “for how little money can you break any amount of trust”. Not sure how they could avoid that (besides being competent in the first place..)

Re: When employees feel slighted, they work less

#229

Post by sgustard »

nsgi wrote: post #25

As a Brit, the birthday card example feels oddly American. The effect seems plausible, but the UK equivalent slight would be something much more informal

Sounds like it's not unheard of in the UK: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskUK/comments/1fabd0c/how_does_you...

Re: When employees feel slighted, they work less

#230

Post by [deleted] »

hypeatei wrote: post #64

Maybe I'm a bit jaded, and corporate environments have taken their toll, but I see the employee-manager relationship as adversarial by default. Whether my boss wishes me happy birthday or not doesn't move the needle much. I'm there to contribute as an individual and he's there to answer to his boss about staffing, budgeting, and performance. Although, I do feel slighted when a manager acknowledges the absurdity of al…

[deleted]
Post reply on HN