251–260 of 279 posts
There's a lot of jeering, I suspect at the headline more than anything, but having documented research can be helpful in changing management behavior. The changes in employee behavior documented here are not ones that managers would easily connect to their past behavior, such as a late birthday recognition. When you train a dog, you have to give a reward very soon after the desired behavior, otherwise the dog won't a…
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This is an oversimplificstion. The relationship between the person holding the scarce resource, and the person holding the common resource, has always been adversarial. As labor becomes more skilled and less common this dynamic changes.
I’m looking at the status quo. Which still puts vastly more negotiating power in the hands owners of capital in most economies today. I agree it’s an oversimplification and there are some markets where this is not the case. If I consider my experience it’s clearly still in the minority, so I still consider myself fortunate.
I figured it was worth mentioning since the status quo among HN users, skews closer to markets where this does not apply, than the status quo of the general population.
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> When you train a dog, you have to give a reward very soon after the desired behavior, otherwise the dog won't associate the reward with the behavior Regarding dog training, one can use a placeholder for the reward. This is useful, for example, if you want to reward a dolphin jumping through a hula, because you will not be able to give the reward at that moment, but for example, you can say "yes!" or use a clicker a…
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.
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> You can train a human using the exact same skills you use to train a dog. Depending on the context, this can traumatize a human though. This idea has been the basis for both gay conversion therapy and applied behavior analysis. The latter I have had the misfortune to directly experience myself.
You don't think those same things traumatize the dog too? There's a reason why all reputable dog trainers advocate exclusively positive training methods. It's because training with exclusively positive feedback is not only most likely to get the behavior you want. It critically avoids destabilizing the dog. Negative reinforcement learning does works, but it also leads to anxiety, and "reactionary outbursts". i.e. the…
"The lost productivity was a form of revenge, with slighted employees taking more paid sick time, arriving late, leaving early, and taking longer breaks." Someone will feel slighted no matter how well you treat them. I blame all of the 'micro-aggression' nonsense we've seen in the last couple of years and subreddits like /r/antiwork. This sounds like just the kind of thing that's encouraged there. "The study found th…
Also known as "passive aggressive behavior" to people who aren't primarily educated by episodes of South Park.
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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.
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…
Your boss is playing a role, same as you.
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Some time ago I had my 10 year anniversary forgotten once in a company (where I had written almost the entire codebase for their core product myself) and I did feel slighted. I had felt invested in the company, to me this day was a big deal and my company was completely unaware. It felt like a disorienting mismatch of unreciprocated commitment and made me feel a bit sick in the pit of my stomach. I started looking fo…
My company gave out nice plaques for ten year anniversaries. As my anniversary neared I frankly got really excited to receive mine. My manager started a couple months before myself, and a colleague started a couple months later. We still work together all our anniversaries in a line. My manager got his plaque and showed it off. I patiently awaited mine. When my 10 year anniversary came around we were in the middle of…
I was the second person to not get a plaque after they stopped the 10-years at work. Instead I got an email.
I knew one of the last people to get one, so was expecting mine two weeks later.
And I knew Sarah, who started a week before me, and had printed out her 10-year email and a picture of the clock. I found mine at a thrift store. When I left I set it on her desk on the way out. Hope she liked it.
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> When you train a dog, you have to give a reward very soon after the desired behavior, otherwise the dog won't associate the reward with the behavior. Likewise, a manager is not going to associate a slight towards an employee with an increase in absenteeism or lower productivity that happens days and weeks later. Note that GP is comparing the _managers_ motivation to a dog’s motivation, not the worker. It’s about a…
>It’s about a delayed feedback loop to the manager, who won’t connect the punishment (lower productivity) with the bad behavior (slighting the employee). It's delayed because the employee fears further retribution still. You need some distance between yourself and the bloodthirsty dog before you can even hope to reduce your productivity, or you'll be mauled quite enthusiastically. By delaying it for days or weeks, by…
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You don’t find Pavlov’s manager the least bit humorous?
Do you reckon Pavlov associated a ringing bell with feeding his dog? (Also as a furry this whole thread is funny.)