United Airlines Replaces Bonuses with a Lottery

Moreover, it is a very dim-witted program. sub-2% chance of a reward? Take a sick day and lose elgibility? Welcome to an environment of malicious compliance, UA.

Relevant quote from the article:

>"I can't imagine driving the Mercedes into the employee lot while everyone around me that worked just as hard, or harder got nothing. I would feel like such a jerk. It's quite telling about the people who thought this up. I bet they would be gloating happily if they won." --Flight Attendant - Domestic

> Why would any company want to encourage any employee to come to work sick and maybe contagious?

I noticed such policies at some companies which had a very high sick leave percentage. Sometimes it's difficult to determine if someone is faking being sick. I guess one way of to try and solve that is giving people money. I hope nobody does this when the sick leave percentage is average due to mentioned working while sick is bad result.

Because management can't manage.

We are engineers. So we think in terms of what you'd need to do, to achieve effectively statistical certainty that you'll be able to send a plane on it's way in almost all cases, while minimizing costs.

Such a process would involve a set of actions that you'd have to execute, as a management team, using a set of employees, so that everyone is in the correct place at the correct time, and the odds of anyone getting into trouble is minimal, and this gets planned out over time, optimized by a scheduling algorithm.

Then, if things go wrong, you simply re-run your algorithm to deal with the new situation and you do the best that can possibly be done. Of course, such a program is very hard to write.

The stories I've heard about management actually doing this are VERY few and VERY far between, and even then only about very specific things (and only things that would apply to multiple airlines, e.g. optimizing flight plans and fuel tanking). Instead, management layers simply threaten the layer below them into perfect attendance (which works for a while when employees are desperate for jobs) and when things inevitably go wrong they go into full panic mode and spend 50x what is really necessary to fix things. During such panics, even basic events seem to come as total surprises to management. For instance, there was a news message about a problem in Amsterdam Schiphol due to the weather. The problem was understandable, a re-frozen ice layer on the tarmac prevented safely taking off. 10 or so flights got canceled for one airline, for close to 2000 passengers, and there were 2 customer service representatives that, obviously, had a rather hard time dealing with this (there were 20+ doing ticketing for flights that weren't going to happen ... but using those ... nope). Management eventually provided hotel rooms for about 800 of those passengers and put beds in a terminal at around 6am for the rest. Lots of court cases are underway, and are unlikely to go well for the airline).

How's your fiction writing? I think you have the basis of a dystopia where AI replaces management and nobody notices they're robots until it's too late.

The replication crisis most associated with psychology also appears to extend to many behavioral economics results. There's good reason to be skeptical of many of these studies.

A low-odds, high-reward gamble may still be preferred to its complement, but we must also consider aversion to loss of the bonus to which employees are accustomed. The new program could--but probably still wouldn't--make sense if it were an incentive in addition to the bonus.

The execs probably hope to leverage irrationality around games of chance. This will provide net morale at a lower program cost. It's good that this innovation will be nipped in the bus before it spreads across corporate America.

This seems right out of the "Undercover Boss" playbook. With the cameras rolling, a lucky few get their college/student loans paid for and nice vacation, while the vast majority of employees get nothing.