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How to kill a company's morale in one easy memo

technocrat.net

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Re: How to kill a company's morale in one easy memo

#41

Post by Periodic »

abstractbill wrote: post #4

From the comments: My sister used to work for a large multinational that pressured people to come in on Saturdays. The employees would come in but they would work on personal tasks like paying bills and balancing their checkbooks. It was all for appearance and it just pissed off the employees. She left the company after this pressure started. Part of her Saturday "work" was looking for a new job. In my experience thi…

It's a case of misplaced metrics. I can't find the name of the paper or the researcher, but I believe it's been shown that when you try to reward/punish some metric of productivity, invariably the employees will begin to maximize that metric, perhaps at the expense of productivity.

Measuring number of hours in the office is not a direct measurement of productivity, and these employees were meeting the metric, but only costing the company money, not making it any.

Incentive structures are tricky.

Re: How to kill a company's morale in one easy memo

#42

Post by barrkel »

jgrahamc wrote: post #18
mrbgty wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you defending this guy?

No. I'm pointing out that he may be a total ass, but it doesn't seem to have hurt his company.

Yes, but you didn't present evidence that he didn't hurt his company. You presented evidence that he didn't hurt the company so badly that it didn't grow, but not that he didn't hurt the company.

Re: How to kill a company's morale in one easy memo

#43

Post by hernan7 »

nuxi7 wrote: post #37
dbrannan wrote: post #11

Hmm... sounds like this issue could be solved if everyone stopped car-pooling.

Or if everyone just left their cars at work and took public transit/carpools the rest of the time.

Or, if they bought a $500 lemon, left it taking up space in the company parking lot and kept commuting as usual. In that case, are the $500 tax-deductible?

Re: How to kill a company's morale in one easy memo

#45

Post by wildmXranat »

abstractbill wrote: post #4

From the comments: My sister used to work for a large multinational that pressured people to come in on Saturdays. The employees would come in but they would work on personal tasks like paying bills and balancing their checkbooks. It was all for appearance and it just pissed off the employees. She left the company after this pressure started. Part of her Saturday "work" was looking for a new job. In my experience thi…

My first programming job after graduation had a paid Saturday requirement that crept in a couple of months after I started. I think I was the only one that said no to it. I didn't even think twice about the decision and Mondays felt a lot better from my perspective.

Re: How to kill a company's morale in one easy memo

#46

Post by ScotterC »

dget wrote: post #31
ScotterC wrote: post #10

Man this is terrible management and exactly the type of thing that just asks for backlash. Where's the students of history? When you create a police state like this in a company, control will be lost, morale will fall and productivity crashes. Abusing your force only makes it worse.

While I agree that it asks for backlash - do we actually know what happened? It seems like the company's doing decently, so I'm not sure the students of history will have much to work off of.

More talking about actual history such as 19th century Europe.

However this memo is dated as August '06 so we can assume that it happened sometime earlier that summer. From this google finance chart: http://bit.ly/ar1PSo it shows the massive dip the company took in July of the same year.

Aside from all that, actions like this will bite you in the ass in one form another. I doubt many visitors to hacker news hold CEO Neal L. Patterson in high regard after this.

Re: How to kill a company's morale in one easy memo

#49

Post by ryanwaggoner »

I'd actually like to take a step back from the hate-fest going on in the comments here and evaluate this. Before you downvote me, at least read what I have to say.

This email is a classic example of poor communication. It's very clear that the guy is frustrated and is taking it out via an emotional response. However, we don't know the whole story here, do we? From my reading, it sounds like this has been an ongoing problem for awhile now. Keep in mind that this was in 2001, not exactly an easy time to be running a software company. I can imagine the frustration of running a large company with thousands of employees and seeing a lack of results, coupled with evidence of employees not spending much time at work. What would you do in such a case? Not necessarily with regard to the email, which I think we can all agree was in poor taste, but with regard to the actions he says he's going to take.

Additionally, we don't know if this memo did in fact kill morale at the company. We know that the company has done well over the last nine years, and that Mr. Patterson was recently honored as one of the best bosses in the country. The Wikipedia entry specifically mentions the metric of great performance relative to compensation, so he's obviously creating value.

I guess my point is that everyone makes mistakes, especially when they're frustrated and facing a large problem. And make no mistake, managing a software company with several thousand people in 2001 would be a challenge. I'm not saying this was the right approach, but what exactly would you do? And more importantly, if you've never faced management at that scale, why do you think it would be more effective than his approach?

Re: How to kill a company's morale in one easy memo

#50

Post by RyanMcGreal »

Periodic wrote: post #41
abstractbill wrote: post #4

From the comments: My sister used to work for a large multinational that pressured people to come in on Saturdays. The employees would come in but they would work on personal tasks like paying bills and balancing their checkbooks. It was all for appearance and it just pissed off the employees. She left the company after this pressure started. Part of her Saturday "work" was looking for a new job. In my experience thi…

It's a case of misplaced metrics. I can't find the name of the paper or the researcher, but I believe it's been shown that when you try to reward/punish some metric of productivity, invariably the employees will begin to maximize that metric, perhaps at the expense of productivity. Measuring number of hours in the office is not a direct measurement of productivity, and these employees were meeting the metric, but onl…

>I believe it's been shown that when you try to reward/punish some metric of productivity, invariably the employees will begin to maximize that metric, perhaps at the expense of productivity.

After years of direct involvement in measuring productivity, I would accept that as a general axiom. I've likened it to badly applied wallpaper: push down a bubble and it just pops up somewhere else.

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