The worst morale-boosting gesture I've experienced
shkspr.mobi
shkspr.mobi
At company-wide meetings, stand out performers were given 'top-banana' awards, which if I'm remembering correctly were actually bananas. I think one of my buddies actually kept his on his desk and let it rot until some poor cleaning person threw it away.
The company would order pizzas for lunch to encourage people not to go out, but charged a dollar a slice. Leftover pizza was wrapped individually in tinfoil, frozen, and available for sale the next day, still for a dollar. I remember several rounds of company wide emails chastising people for not paying for frozen pizza.
Shortly after that first bankruptcy filing, the company filed again and liquidated. Steve and Barry were bought out after the first filing and will never have to work again.
The place was miserable. Dirty clothing strewn all over the place. I bought a couple shirts for like $8 each. Neither of them fit all that well. They disintegrated after one wash. One was cut crooked.
Seems like the whole company was a thin (and I mean thin) quick fashion veneer over sweatshop labor?
They had a boiler room team of salespeople who made an insane amount of money. We are talking six figures a month. They were not at all highly skilled or had any financial background or degree.
Their bonuses could be a luxury car. (or once a horse).
I worked on the IT side. We made the software that basically did all the work. It included instructions of a spiel to sell loans, how to get around various excuses and such. And it did all the work with filing the required paperwork ensuring all the required information was there, sending out information to the people who refinanced all that crap. You could, in practice, take someone from the street, set them up with this software and they could sell loans. (this is not as far fetched as it may sound).
I have so many stories about my time there but anyways, the IT team was not at all highly paid, nor very appreciated. One Christmas we knew we were getting a bonus, and given what we knew about bonuses being handed out we were kinda excited.
Wanna guess what it was?
A $50 gift card for a ham.
Sounds like they were a little too inspired by National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation. I guess the Jelly of the Month Club was all sold out though.
A past employer used the software we built to create a commissions lottery [1] for a call center floor, and paid huge commissions to an "R&D team" that "value added", but really just created idiotic Access reports from the software's databases (sometimes bringing the Production databases to their knees until we started forcing them to use clones and BI data lakes), but software development was a "cost center" ineligible for commissions, despite doing all the "real" work (including any and all efficiency gains). At one point the executives convinced themselves despite huge turnover that they were somehow magically hiring "better" call center staff.
I feel somewhat confident that that companies misplaced ideas of work/efficiency/how it was profitable were directly correlated with its misplaced sense of ethics. The "R&D team", for instance, seemed representative of the sort of bottom feeder scum that play political games well but don't actually have any skills of their own, and arguably at the end of the day that was roughly what the company as a whole was, a bottom feeder parasite playing politics well enough to make a ton of money surviving in an ethically dubious evolutionary niche.
[1] We had proof that it was a really bad lottery, too. The software was something like 95%+ accurate in how much money was likely associated with each item that went out to the call center. To make things "fair" we kept getting a lot of feedback to make it as "random" as possible.
After a couple of trainees in our area committed suicide, there was a cry and a hue about attending to trainee mental health. Our hospital took this to heart, and decided: they’d hold a resident mental health day!
This took the form of an iced cream party for the residents. Specifically, it meant they got some tri-flavor cartons of iced cream and stuck them in the physicians lounge. They did not give the residents any protected time to take a shit, much less go down to the physicians lounge for iced cream. None of the residents got any, and the attendings ended up eating it. They subsequently sent out an email patting themselves on the back for the efforts they were making to keep any more residents from jumping off the fucking roof.
Another time: it was physician day. I hadn’t actually seen this before, most hospitals don’t bother praising physicians, but this was a safety net hospital with shit salaries. The trainees on the psych floor were encouraged to go down and get some of that free salad and pizza.
All the patients had been seen, nothing was going down, so they handed off the floor to the nurses and mid levels to go get some of that fancy pizza the folks in charge kept telling them to go get. This is normal; multiple staff qualified to run a code remained on the floor (a code is basically an algorithm for administering cpr, with attendant drugs).
A medicine attending waited for them to leave the floor and go downstairs. The moment they were good and gone, he called a fake code. When the mid-levels, nurses, and med students arrived, all trained in running a code, the attending put them aside, and kept waiting for the residents to arrive. Eventually, of course, they did.
They then proceeded to get ripped new assholes for having had the temerity to go downstairs for lunch after having been told by their seniors to do so, and leaving their patients appropriately covered. They got sent to lunch just so they could be scolded for getting lunch.
But that sort of shit only happens to psych residents. Other residents would never be told to take 20 mins to grab lunch.
My direct supervisor was at first puzzled as to why I wasn't coming with him to the dinner at the end of the day, and then he was quite appalled - I think he later had words with the director about the whole thing.
I have a standing rule. If I work overtime it's because I fucked up. I said something would be done by Friday but I goofed off, I'll work.
If I'm working nights and weekends for business reasons, then my manager is in the building the entire time. A lot of them tone down their rhetoric when you make them put skin in the game. All of a sudden some of the scope gets negotiated down.
Unless it’s because I screwed up and need to fix something post haste. In which case, he won’t have to ask me at all.
I worked at a startup that did citizen identity management for government (think SSO for an entire province). Because of gov’t IT policies, we often had to deploy after hours, in a kind of weird “managed IT” process. We still automated the process, but couldn’t press the button without being on a conference call etc.
Anyway, we had a deployment go south on Friday night, rolled it back, and decided to come back and try again Sunday. The CEO himself showed up about 10 minutes after we did with a big box of Dilly Bars. Normally that would put this in the category of this thread: “thanks, I’m working overtime for ice cream...” but what he said made it all better: “I know this sucks to be here today. Help yourselves to ice cream. And I’ll be in my office all day, stop by if you need anything. And please let me know when you’re done so I know I can go home.”
Awesome awesome dude.
The counterpoint (funny enough, at the same company as the ice cream) was a different exec who came close but just missed the mark. Weekday evening deployment (started at 5:30pm) and he orders pizza. A lot of pizza. Things go smoothly and since we're just sitting and watching monitoring for a bit to make sure all is good, he decides to head out. Ten minutes after he leaves, we get a call about a third-party site that broke after the deployment... guess we're not leaving.
So the debugging drags on, and around 11pm we start getting hungry. AHA! Leftover pizza in the fridge! We go to the kitchen to discover... he took all of the leftovers home. Like 4 pizzas worth. So what's our conclusion? "Fuck it, we'll fix it in the morning. Let's go home."
All it would have taken waa leftover pizza...
Get the money, then go home.
Next up was an appreciation gesture where we were thanked for all of our extra hard work with a pack of "Extra" gum and a delivery of baked potatoes (with all the fixings, at least). Unfortunately, the potatoes didn't arrive until about 2pm and no announcement was made. There was just a couple tins in the corner of the kitchen.
That seemed wrong, so I implemented a bonus plan where you get paid 60% of everything you bill over your weekly goals and made working extra hours optional. I love writing those bonus checks!
Also please tell me you aren't proud of paying for overtime and I'm misunderstanding that too. That should be the minimum expectation.
I'd take 60% per hour for overtime in a heartbeat as long as it was optional, since I've always ended up doing that kind of work for client/manager goodwill (or the pleasure of not being fired).
(This is off the top of my head based on an internship 6 years ago)
So in order to be successful at this and deliver maximum shame you have to pay the same amount of lip service to the fiction as management does while savagely illustrating the reality. And do it as publicly as possible, but not in a town hall or all-hands meeting. All-hands meetings are ridiculously expensive from the corporate perspective so derailing them to make a point makes you out to be a villain. At least wait until they ask for questions.
But if the boss gets up and grabs everyone's attention for a minute, that's the perfect time to go on the warpath. "So what are we going to get for all this effort? Gift certificate to Applebees?" especially if that's something that's been done before. The idea here is that the boss is making an appeal to sacrifice personal comfort for the good of the company. That's never okay and is poor management. So raise the question of what we're getting in return.
The payoff is twofold. First everyone paying attention gets the pleasure of watching the boss squirm. Second is the eventual pavlovian conditioning that gets the boss to respect the workers by not making unreasonable demands just because nobody will stand up to them. They need to justify it with more than hoorahs.
The best part of it I think is if you do this once and get away with it, you won't see it again for awhile, then when they do and you have to remind them again, you can watch that flash of 'oh right, I can't do that with Vince around' on their face.
Won't work in the public sector where the expectation to sacrifice yourself for the public good is intrinsic to the culture. But I consider carrying the torch for workplace respect part of what I consider "managing up" and one of the things I try to bring to every role.
Being the DoD, it couldn’t be that simple. They decided that actually the bonuses had to be approved by your second, third, and fourth line supervisors. And also by the program manager at the sponsoring agency. Forms had to be filled out, lost, found, signed, routed, xeroxed, left on desks while people were on vacation. Passed through legal and security.
Also, the bonus was distributed among all the team members being rewarded. The $1000 figure was the maximum allowed for the total bonus, not the individual bonuses.
My team did something outstanding. It took 18 months of hard labor. Overtime. High stakes demonstrations. We ended up bringing in tens of millions of dollars in funding. A full year later an extra $150 showed up in my paycheck.
PS I forgot another incident. I was nominated for a prestigious award, given by an official very high up at the Pentagon. I was asked to write my own nomination letter. I was given the award; to receive it I had to dress up in a suit, show up early to work, shake the official’s hand, and then spend an hour giving him a tour. The actual award was a letter of commendation and a challenge coin. There was no bonus.
Theoretically, the challenge coin would be worth a lifetime of free drinks in bars frequented by military members. Or so I’m told. I don’t drink.
The net bonus was probably $150 before tax; it's a rare employer that pays the tax for you.
It's easier to recognize that you're playing one than that you're making one, it seems.
End of the day, the most passionately written nominations were for people in IT support, mostly for doing shit they weren’t supposed to do. The “customer champion” replaced toner quickly at our expense, (it was supposed to be paid for by the customer for reasons). The other big one, that came with cash, was given to someone who was a notorious master of getting other people to do their work.
I felt bad for the organizers, as they really intended to do a good thing.
You can imagine what happened. My favorite was two folks that were related to each other awarded the "Nepotism Award" to each other.
It might have been misjudged in this instance however, but they're a thing in military circles so I can imagine how it seemed like a good idea.
Tbh I'd have been really pleased, but I can appreciate that's not universal.
I've never seen a civilian use one. We don't spend much time in bars, and the feeling I get is that if I did try to whip one out in the presence of uniformed personnel -- a challenge that I would almost certainly win, given who this coin was from -- that would be a tremendous faux pas.
So at best, this is the sort of object that carries some real meaning in a very particular social context among a very particular set of people, but that meaning doesn't carry over to anywhere else. Like baseball or Pokemon cards, I suppose. How would you feel about your boss switching out Christmas bonuses for packs of World of Warcraft cards?
Which "axes" are in play, and who "wins" (or ties, a lot of the rule variations I've heard are set up to optimize towards ties; the most common challenge is just whether or not the other person has a challenge coin of any sort, not necessarily trying to figure out which wins if both people have coins on them) varies a lot between groups.
Also, challenge coins have seeped into some parts of lay culture, especially bar culture (given that alcohol has always been the big bet, it shouldn't be a surprise). For instance, the liqueur Fernet has its own challenge coins that bartenders tend to challenge each other for free shots of Fernet. (Bars try to keep one in reach of the bar at all times in case the bar is challenged, and the number of people that have them that have them that aren't themselves bartenders is supposedly kept quite rare.) https://talesofthecocktail.com/history/part-family-behind-sc...
Incidentally, Howard Tayler's Unofficial Anecdotal History of Challenge Coins is excellent.
https://www.schlockmercenary.com/assets/img/uploads/UAHCC/UA...
One guy I know has enough of these things you’d think he was a navy seal, mostly from training sessions. His actual job is monk-like copying/summarizing of NIST documents and CVEs.
Also challenge coins, especially given to a civilian employee, are considered an honor in the DoD. Your post gives the impression of a great sense of entitlement on your part.
I have a stack of fourteen of them. Most of them I was given for spending thirty minutes giving some random officer a tour of the lab. They're not exactly hard to get.
This may be frowned upon in the military, but you could rent the coin out to people?
They also had posters of stuff like "the mood elevator" pasted up in the kitchen: https://themoodelevator.com/
Everyone I felt like I could talk to about this thought this was childish, idiotic nonsense. Do companies have thousands of childish people who take this stuff seriously and think it is great? Or does everyone have to just pretend because they don't want to get fired?
I have a hard time understanding it. Anyway I left that place.
My previous employer did something similar with a word they invented -- except it was really just a synonym for efficiency.
The CFO got so excited that he had a bunch of posters printed out and handed out smaller versions to the supervisors. The supervisors all thought it was embarrassing but none of them had the guts to say that to the CFO.
To this day they still list that fake word in all their job postings with a little blurb about what it means, completely unaware that most applicants will probably spit their coffee out laughing at the absurdity of it. I think it might even have its own page on their website too...
ETA: I found that Claire has posted a sampling of these on her site: http://cargocollective.com/clairest/Miscellaneous
The surveys are thankfully anonymous.
I know these useless surveys will never have any effect, and you never hear about any results or changes that have happened because of the surveys.
There are only checkboxes for "mildly agree", "agree", etc.
But there is usually a tiny "other comments" box. So I usually write long diatribes about all the company's failings in that tiny "other comments" box.
At least I'm getting paid while filling them out, but they must be wondering who the disgruntled truth-sayer is, since I'm sure not many in the company actually bother to do the surveys.
The only reason I know not many actually bother to do the surveys is because they do release stats on that, and encourage people to do them - I imagine it's some kind of Executive KPI for worker engagement or some such bullshit.
I'm sorry, have you recovered?
Dealing with their accounting/auditing software is not good for ones health.
Amazon's values work because management is deadly serious about implementing them. You may not enjoy working at a company organized around those values, but they keep the majority of people focused where Bezos wants them focused. Apple has a very different set of values; still works. Ditto Google.
At companies under a certain size, you don't need to write down your values to make sure everyone knows what they are. One of the common causes of growth failure is forgetting to keep an eye on your values as you grow, and then all of a sudden half the new engineers don't seem to understand why you need to keep latency as low as possible.
Here's an interviewing tip. If the company you're interviewing at has core values, ask how they apply to the team you're looking at. Bonus points if it's a core value that doesn't seem to apply -- maybe something about product if you're interviewing for a datacenter job, say. If the answer is weak, the company might have lost track of how it wants to do business.
That sounds like a pretty big statement of the company's values, regardless of what they actually said.
It ended up being wildly more successful than anticipated and pulled in double digit millions the first year. The marketing representative's commission ended up being middle six figures as a result.
He sent us a case of Tastykake snack cakes as thanks. That was all we got in the way of thanks from the company.
Was the wild success of the initiative due to your team’s outstanding technical genius?
Well, I'm a bit skeptical. Someone who makes $500K unexpectedly isn't going to lose $500K unexpectedly.
A producer at this broker made just over $50k on commission if they busted ass. This program was so successful that he made close to half a million.
I mentioned his gift not because it was shitty but because it was the only form of thanks or acknowledgement we received.
It was actually a great gift at the time because we're located in Little Debbie country and didn't even know what Tastykake was. It contextualize so much pop culture (e.g. Clerks).
> "Study showed that monetary incentives are great for routine, mechanical work. But how does it play when talking about cognitive, advanced tasks? Not well at all."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dgKKPQiRRag
Counter-counter point: If anyone ever points you to this for evidence _you_ shouldn't get a bonus/monetary reward system, ask if _they_ get a bonus/monetary reward system...
This to me is the single biggest killer of motivation / productivity. If you've got this problem, I agree with the video that even large monetary rewards won't salvage productivity.
A yearly bonus or a "thank you"/party/etc aren't rewards tied to specific tasks. They're meant to be gestures of appropriation. You're discussing a bonus structure that ties financial incentives to very specific work items, and rewards them accordingly.
I'm not disagreeing with your point, just pointing out they're two different topics.
Like what if someone shows up to an event you planned, and starts thanking people for coming. They're basically implying/claiming ownership of the event. Appropriation through appreciation.
In other words what if you thought a project was yours, and then someone appropriates it by thanking your team, implying it was for that person all along?
Some people want to feel appreciated, some want to feel like their work makes a difference in the world, and some really are motivated by huge wads of cash.
I feel happier when I get a bonus that brings retirement closer, or lets me give more to charotsbt causes I believe in, or gives me a day off, instead of a throwaway toy or schwag or a gift card or a meal at an expensive restaurant that doesn't serve food I can eat.
A merit increase at the end of the year stays with you for the rest of your career. A $1,000 bonus is gone as soon as it's spent.
I've seen some organizations that use bonuses to cover over the fact that people aren't getting raises, and I would expect people who do cognitive tasks to be better able to run the math on why that's bad.
The common example is if a daycare has parents frequently turning up late for pick up, so they have to stay open late. So they decided to apply a surcharge for latecomers in a study. The problem got worse, since the the value of the fine was less impactful than the guilt felt by most parents. It was now seen as more acceptable to be late.
Example write-up: http://freakonomics.com/2013/10/23/what-makes-people-do-what...
Everyone kept looking at me like "What the hell?".
But as I meet more and more people with food sensitivities I think that providing food for an event is just fraught anyway, and maybe you should try something else.
At one place I worked we just used the same folks to bring in food. Rather than debate what they just had packages and we would check boxes (vegetarian, etc) and numbers and blamo reasonable food showed up.
I think the real issue is when you have folks who don't know what they're doing trying to manage it.
Person B: Sure
- goes to taco stand -
Person A: 3 tacos please
Person B: I'll take the enchiladas
Person A: Oh my god, we were supposed to be getting tacos for lunch. How could you do this to me?
No one's saying "assume they are vegans," we're saying "don't assume they eat meat." Big difference.
For real, any corporation employing a significant proportion of Indian people (hell, even non-Indian people too) should be culturally sensitive enough to know that any offer of a morale dinner must feature vegetarian options. This is basic cultural sensitivity and anyone who doesn't understand this has no business managing people.
Less than 1/10th percent Indians eat beef.
Also, not all Indians are fine with the Indians who are fine with steak. Significant conflict over that sort of thing sometimes makes the news outside the country.
People also order from the more expensive end of the menu if the company is paying. Normally they might eat a chicken sandwich for lunch but if the company pays they are eating dead octopus or some other endangered species more intelligent than them.
The other one that I have seen is outright vegetarian baiting, so that means ordering things like crispy chicken's feet or sheep testicles just to push things to the culinary extreme.
Working with Indian co-workers on training in the UK the Friday treat was KFC. Eaten at desks. So the whole place reeked of the stuff and every surface had the finger licking slime. Bins had bones in them. If you are the lone vegetarian you have to just keep quiet. But with 6-7 people over from India in the office? The company can't just change its KFC ritual.
Few people were what you might call athletic in that office.
Like when Delta gave a food voucher to make up for a 5-hour delay on a 30-minute file. The voucher was for $3. Fuck Delta.
Except they didn't actually budget for this. Their idea was that the whole office would go out and... celebrate? Us being laid off? And pay for it ourselves?
We did.
As far as I'm concerned, that's the way you do it if you're going down with the ship. Drink with the crew, pay for them, and tell stories and try to make plans as you slip into the waters. 19 years later, I'm still friends with all but one who disappeared to the offline somehow.
Ended up giving my director a slightly embarrassing hug when we got back in, but we'd been through enough over the past that she forgave me and we're still friends.
It's something I still have to buy her a beer for every couple of years or so.
We obviously got past it, but it makes for an amusing story as she's never seen me that inebriated since, and actually didn't know I could get that buzzed as well as be demonstrative.
https://europa.eu/youreurope/citizens/travel/passenger-right...
If you scored the _highest_ level on your performance review, the level that required approval from several levels of HR to ensure that not too many people got it... you might get a 1.25% salary increase. If you scored "satisfactory" you might get a 0.75% increase.
Eventually some consultant told them that doing performance-based raises for such meager amounts and meager differences between high and low end, were actually found by research to have a negative impact on morale. (I left soon after that, so not sure what they changed to).
One more case of many of paying an expensive consultant to tell you something that was obvious to most of your staff already but you didn't listen to them.
But yeah it amazes me people can't figure out the tiny reward is wonky.
You think I wasn't already doing my best, but what's going to motivate me to really give you my best is the promise of a 2% raise, if I successfully navigate the insane beurocracy to fill out my paperwork the right way to game the system and have my manager cooperate?
You don't just think I take no pride in my work and don't care about the project/mission itself, you also think I'm cheap/desperate.
This is basically how I felt about the Amazon employee discount program, which if I remember right was 10% off all purchases, capped at $100 / year.
“Sales people are motivated by money; engineers are motivated by fun work. So just do your job and have fun!”
I’m not even interested in money, just a little respect would’ve been great! Needless to say, I quit shortly thereafter.
>I spend all day lying to people, saying, "You look so pretty," and "Santa can't wait to visit with you. You're all he talks about. It's just not Christmas without you. You're Santa's favorite person in the entire tri-state area."
>
>Sometimes I lay it on really thick. "Aren't you the princess of Rongovia? Santa said that a beautiful princess was coming to visit him. He said she would be wearing a red dress and that she was very pretty, but not stuck up or two-faced. That's you isn't it?" I lay it on and the parents mouth the words, "Thank you," and "Good job."
For one, if someone didn't get at least one pat on the back, it is very demoralizing for them. Also, there are a lot of teammates did not get a pat by the persons they think should be gratuitous would be a little resentful. I think it's one of the dumbest morale boosting activities.
Of course, the real red flag was starting at $10/hr 1099’d (almost definitely illegally) and being told it’s more than most people start at. For software engineering. After a good interview. I was astounded and perplexed, but it was my first software job, I was a college dropout, and I was still living with my parents, so I took it anyways. But if I knew what I know now, just a few years later, I would’ve laughed in their faces. Oh well.
I've been there, and it wasn't even a startup. The company credit cards had 1% back, redeemable as gift cards. The owner/CEO insisted on paying as many vendors and contracts as possible via credit card to rack up the points. The stack of gift cards (for places he didn't like enough to keep the cards) became the de-facto office "perk me up", particularly after bouts of excessive overwork.
After a few months they rewarded me for my hard work by giving me a raise of $1. At the time I was grateful but now I realize what an insult that was.
This only works if, and because, you are ready to walk away. It's the easiest form of negotiating. But it does require you to actually be able to walk away!
Aren't we all adults and know this is how this game is played ?
This is not a success story - it only worked because I was an incredibly poor negotiator and signed on for at least 20% under my market value.
Forget the moral arguments for a second, even in purely financial terms it would likely pay for itself in recruitment savings alone, let alone brain drain/efficiency, training costs, and so on.
Even a "cheap" employee in a white collar job, is likely costing $60K or more (inc. the employer's share of taxes, benefits, etc). 1% of that is only $600. But people won't pay even that towards bonuses/comfortable chairs/second monitors/"thank you" lunches/staff parties.
At some point it seems a lot less to do with what is rational/logical, and more to do with the power dynamics and people higher up the chain's apathy. Companies are actually hurting themselves for seemingly no good reason. It isn't even fiscally responsible.
In the situation I was in there were some penny punchers who felt quite proud of saving a couple hundred bucks here or there and couldn't see the forest through the trees of the misc expenses they were "saving".
It was really just poor management.
It would probably take a company that had all of its shit in order to have a nice report about how HR initiatives over some amount of years was directly correlated to lower employee turnover. If you can't put it in a report to accurately understand the impact of the expenditure it probably becomes hard to justify. I think this must explain all the ineffective half measures and low budgets.
Last year I went to a meeting in France that was held in a rather old building in Grenoble. It was a day long meeting so they brought in a boxed lunch for everyone. Shocking. There was some sushi, chicken in pasta, hot rolls, chocolate cake, and two small bottles of wine and water. It was fantastic.
I was slow on the uptake, but then it hit me, given a choice between spending money on people or things, they chose to spend it on people. Honestly, a total shock for me.
In Silicon Valley I make 3 times as much (after tax) as I made in my high tax European country, but my work place life is crap in comparison.
I had my space and some level of control of the environment, but everyone was within earshot if needed.
It's always a balance.
For example, I'm used to more or less annual all-hands dinners at inadequate restaurants, with better wine for the partners (all sitting together, of course) and combined with partners-only yacht weekends and the like.
What it boils down to is that the penny-pinching stuff is the stuff that's least painful for managers to cut. Firing people sucks, selling big things like buildings is hard and takes a long time. Whereas cutting off the free soda is something the manager can do right now, without having to pick a fight with other managers or launch into a whole gigantic process.
The irony is that cutting the penny-pinching stuff is usually the wrong thing to do, because by the time the managers accept that they're underwater cutting small expenses is no longer enough to right the ship. What they should do is bite the bullet and make one big cut that's big enough to solve the problem; that at least would minimize the effect on morale, since they could tell everyone who's still there that they survived the cut and are now safe.
But again, that requires some courage and willingness to accept some pain, whereas cutting off the sodas is easy and painless. So they do the easy thing, and start down the road of endless little cuts that sap morale and drive people away without actually solving the problem.
This was in 2009/2010. They did a intranet article about how smart they were for cutting the cheese and how it saved $10k a year... in a lunch program that staffed ~100 and fed ~10000.
It was quite clear that it cost MORE to cut the cheese in lost wages from people bickering, complaining, and spinning the decision. however, I'm sure it looked like a quick win for the non-salad-eating manager in charge.
The owner (main shareholder) of the company decided that what the company needed was a new CEO to turn the ship around.
At the time, the company was so broke that we were getting less than the needed amount of office supplies. At the end of each month, basics were missing. So us, the employees, were bringing in our own toilet paper, coffee, cleaning materials, etc.
The new CEO came in at the end of the month when everything was missing. He felt were were 'gloomy'. So he went out and bought us all balloons and something else I forgot by now.
But the feeling of going to my desk to pick up toilet paper that I had to bring in while carrying a 'free balloon' with some 'motivating' words is something that I will carry forever. It was part of my motivation to spent 8 years self employed.
Sorry, couldn't resist :-)
For my final review, I got high marks without changing a thing.
On the one hand you have to spend time in the company of military folks. On the other hand you have to go to Applebees. Damn that's a hard one to call. I think I'd prefer the coin, at least it's shiny.
I'm trying to mentally justify how this isn't the craziest, stupidest idea ever.
Never attribute to malice or ignorance what can adequately explained by lazy.
You'd have to work pretty hard to convince me that gifting a young woman a sexually explicit novel is not malicious.
Most guys had no clue about the book other than thinking it was a straight forward romance book. I could make the same claims against other people about how they can't tell the difference between spam and real emails or ad results and real results. I know because I'm consistently around it and I HAVE to know. It takes a level of maturity to understand that everyone else doesn't know what you may know.
I'm really thinking you're pushing a bias on the situation. Someone did something potentially nice, but in a lazy ass way. Like getting flowers for someone who is allergic to flowers. The laziness really bit them in the ass. It'd be the same if I told someone I liked horror and they got me Twilight because they heard it was about vampires and werewolves.
That's a situation where you laugh your ass off about it and crack a joke.
Secondly if you do pick a book, you can at least try to make it relevant to someone's actual professional competence - something useful, but not insultingly peppy.
Thirdly if you're going to do that, you can ask them what they want, in a way that indicates you value their competence and opinion.
Gifts and rewards are all about social signalling, hierarchies and statements of relative value. The messages are understood whether or not you're aware you're speaking that language.
If you get it wrong, it's not just demotivating for the person, it's demotivating for everyone else too.
And no, you don't have to be super-serious about it. Jokey gifts are fine, although riskier than something straight. If the culture can take it, they're a good choice. But you have to be very sure that is the culture.
Now, check the op, it's "Most promising grad that's been there for a year." It's a borderline participation trophy. "Congrats, we didn't fire you." More than likely, senior management, who gave it to her, probably felt the same thing and thought making a big deal out of it was pointless. "At least get her something other than some stupid piece of paper". So the guy, who 99% likely didn't know her either, but did ask around what she likes and probably someone said "she likes to read". Maybe he even saw her read a book. Then he just either quickly ordered it off amazon if there was time for it to come in, or just walked into barnes and noble and saw the "New York Times Bestselling Book" table right at the door and picked it out. It is after all, someone he doesn't know. But at the same time thinks a stupid piece of paper and making a big deal about nothing is insulting to her as well. At least get her something of some minor tangible value.
The main point, most guys had no idea what the fuck the book was about the first year or two it came out. They just knew women liked the book and asked no more questions. It has a not racey cover on it. It's easy to think it's not too crazy judging by the cover.
Yea, profession book. Think about that one. "Congrats, we didn't fire you for a year, here's a book that'll teach you to do your job better." Talk about lacking empathy. At least getting a fiction book means, "Congrats, we didn't fire you, have fun with a book."
A gift that's demotivating is one of being generic. A gift that can apply to anyone. At least a book narrows you down to around a rough 30% demographic of a given population with written language. "Oh hey, I notice/heard you like to read. Since you've proved not to be useless to the company, here's a book people seem to like and I hope you enjoy it yourself."
I also highly doubt it was a joking gift. ESPECIALLY AT AN ACCOUNTING FIRM. You realize the HR nightmare and a half. Like, seriously. Because no one has ever fucked up by trying to do a simple nice gesture, ever, in human history. Everything is full of malice, hate and evil. Every single person. Must be if you think asking someone what they want as a gift is even remotely appropriate.
> Most guys had no clue about the book other than thinking it was a straight forward romance book.
These are not compatible sentences. Romance novels are erotica.
I promise you, when people give a f*ck about you they don't gift you the most plastic overhyped book they can find you don't even need to open.
Regardless of motive, they deserve to be mocked for such a stupid act.
And we put them back to front, so they look nicer. https://twitter.com/PeteOtway/status/947495792788590594
I'm unable to think of an explanation for this that isn't terrible: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-48348431
If she was the only person that received 50 Shades and other people received different books then that is an obvious case of harassment.
Or maybe there's another 50 SoG book that about suits for accountants.
Or they confused 50SoG with Lean In, another book about women getting ahead in the corporate world
I'm not going there.
You can definitely make a case for this being harassment of some sort if you _really_ want to see it under that light, but without more context it could easily be an honest mistake.
One day the order came down that Howie Makem was not to appear in public without his head on. The working stiffs figured out the reason: otherwise, they might realise he wasn't actually a cat.
So anyway they announce a "Christmas Bonus":
$50....
I mean I'll take $50 but it felt like such an empty gesture. Just a few years earlier I had gotten $150 bonus while working at a pizza joint. The HR person who sent out the survey that year did not like that factoid about the pizza joint that I provided on their benefits feedback survey.
This company no longer exists but they routinely demanded 6 days a week effort as a matter of principle (if you put the hard work in up front, it pays dividends as the project goes on... and then they just add stuff near the end of the project) Some people left, morale was terrible, what did they do? The C-level staff that a) had limited culinary ability, and b) nobody really wanted to spend time with made a special dinner for everybody, it was quasi mandatory on a Friday night. The CEO even gave a speech about how they could have just taken us to a nice restaurant but it felt more personal and special for them to make and serve us dinner.
To make it even better, there were some vegans in the mix and they didn't have anything that they could eat.
I was on the reverse end of that. A small group of folks eventually became in charge of company morale type events... they only liked "different" things.
So there would be a presentation or event like thing and lunch. Except lunch would be these weird vegan-ish "pizzas" and other dishes catered out, but absolutely NO standard type lunch stuff. I don't mind odd stuff here and there but it was all very unusual and honestly sometimes gross (even the vegans on our team wouldn't eat it). Like at least have a few standard sandwiches.... At one point it became such an issue people stopped going to the events.
The saga went on and on with this group of folks "guarding" the door so people didn't leave early, events eventually became mandatory (people still did not go), etc.
Why, when I was young, well, about 20 years ago at least, the small team that included me was offered a bonus to get something done on time. We worked hard and hit the deadline. The very afternoon we delivered it, I was made redundant.
They gave me a week's severance pay. Unfortunately I had a contract both sides had signed that they'd forgotten about, which entitled me to a month's pay. I waved that in their face (very carefully, I literally did not put it past them to grab it off me and rip it up, they would do that). They paid up.
My share of the bonus? They told me I had no proof so I wasn't getting anything. I took them to the small claims court and got it all plus interest.
It took 18 months but I knew how much they hated losing money, and how they loved screwing people over just because they could.
The biter bit. I enjoyed myself.
* coupon for $10 off a turkey on more than one occasion
* enormous bowl of candy left out for everyone to get fat on. when employees complained that we didn't appreciate a constant supply of candy, CEO whined about how he was giving us "free food" and we were complaining.
* two different employers have decided that they needed to paint a bunch of fancy accent walls. they then get budget painters to put a single sloppy coat of cheap paint over the professionally painted office-wall-grey. ends up looking pitiful.
My contribution: office Christmas party. One drink ticket. Spouse or significant other specifically, emphatically, disinvited.
After one of his mines collapsed:
> The MSHA report heavily criticized Bob Murray's volatile behavior during the crisis, especially at daily briefings for family members, where he "frequently became very irate and would start yelling," even making young children cry, it said. He told family members that "the media is telling you lies" and "the union is your enemy."
http://www.nbcnews.com/id/26050043/ns/us_news-life/t/year-af...
One thing that happened a few years ago was that I was on an improvement project that supposedly saved the company millions of dollars. At the end we won an award and i received an email talking about a big party at headquarters with great entertainment and good food where people could mingle with top management and the board of directors. It described what fantastic opportunity this would be. This went on for paragraphs.
Then the last paragraph said something like “by the way to save money we will send only the project lead and your management (who had nothing to do with the project) to the event but you will also get a nice plaque instead of the $500 or so gift card that used to be normal for this type of award. “. I still don’t know how anyone could write this and not see how crazy it was.
Anyways this was a good reminder to look after myself and not be a “team player”.
Well you can do both, just don't expect anyone to do the first part for you. Especially if that means moving on.
Shortly before Christmas, she and one of the administrative assistant types went around the office with a cart, giving out name plates. She had to ask who everyone was. Then she expressed how valuable you were and how you were doing a wonderful job. She eventually disappeared again, back to wherever she came from, very shortly before the SAIC/Leidos split.
I still have no idea what the hell was going on. And I worked at IBM for several years.
We had to harangue them for 6 weeks before they gave us the damned thing and by that point the fact that we had to work for it a second time completely undermined the thoughtfulness of the original idea.
And earlier boss would come to us at 10 am on Friday and said we could leave early if we finished up early. The third time he did this we all shot daggers at him and there was no fourth time. Because every time he did this we ended up staying late on Friday instead of leaving early. This is the same guy who argued my estimates for a project down by 50% and then the project took 3x as long as he told the customer (if you don't have time to do it right you have time to do it over). But that's a different story.
It's important not to offer an award that you are not 100% sure you can follow through on. It's way worse than nothing. It's Lucy and the fucking football.
It became a running joke until a year or two later when I had my first software development job. The holidays came around, and we all got a letter saying how vital we were to the organization's financial success this year, and to express their appreciation they included a copy of the year's final pay stub.
I had another job where I worked remotely, and they sent out employee recognition packages that were just office supplies with the company logo. The icing on top was that they had insufficient postage and I had to pay for a lousy pen.
I immediately tried to take it.
At a later meeting, when the package was modified, he started out with, "mcguire, you are not eligible."
I'd probably take it on the spot. I mean, if morale is that bad already it's like you're getting a bonus for leaving. Might as well!
The time: a few weeks before the winter holidays, mid-2000s.
What we expected: to hear about our company's IPO or beneficial acquisition.
What we got: orders to design and construct crazy! wacky!! zany!!! miniature golf obstacles in the office for the CxOs to play through.
I doubt the (unquantified) morale at this company improved.
Dude you're still young!
The pen didn't work.
Makes me appreciate the current role more, which has 4 office events a year, a kids Christmas party where the parent-provided presents are reimbursed, and a standard formula for a leaving drinks budget (roughly enough for one drink per employee per year of employment). People still talk about when a 5- and 7-year veteran both finished up in the same week.
The CEO's office was right next to the water dispenser spot. As I was walking through the hallway, I noticed cases of FIJI water bottles in his office. And no, it wasn't for us. It was ALL for him.
For those who don't know, FIJI water bottle costs about 5 - 6 times more than regular water bottles.
The oddest part is that the layoffs everyone expected never materialized.
Months later we were having one of these kick-offs. He stood up on stage, started his slideshow, and offered a few pictures of sunny places where he was having fun playing that sport. Most people in the room knew what they were doing while he was having fun. One of the worst examples of leadership I've witnessed.
That person was let go several months later.
That amount has a great way of signaling that the company is too cheap to do anything real, but too unsophisticated to realize they then should have just given a slice of cake or a birthday card.
You got points for going to unpaid classes in addition to your normal work hours.
It had no backend validation and within 30 minutes I’d awarded myself some company sweatpants.
I got an email a day later asking what size I wanted, and out of fear, I replied that I didn’t want them anymore and I never took another reward.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/formulaone/article-5871773...
> My then manager once closed a team meeting with the words, (literally): "Thank you, and whatever other motivational stuff l'm supposed to say".
Somebody was bad at math...or they thought we were bad at math. It did not improve morale.
There's something extra depressing about working for a company where the millionaire executives think workers can be placated with 25-cent junk food. I think that company is still limping along somehow, which is great because the new Glassdoor reviews are usually pretty amusing.
Also, if you want to see an example of morale boosting gone wrong the Healthineers song is pretty great: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K5LiUrezV6k
A place I worked at one time had the vending machines removed. The owner's neice was overweight and died of cancer and had other health issues, so he didn't want any of the rest of us making poor deciisions and ending up like her
So they took the vending machines out. Great, now we need to go to the gas station a block down the road to get a candy bar, chips, or afternoon soda.
One particularly hot day, the sales team went out to the production floor/warehouse to hand out Powerade (generic gatorade) to the workers.
They brought the social media and marketing people with them to take photos and post the 'good deed ' online. We can only have a soft drink when they deem it necessary!
Did the owner's wife also get "employee of the year" at the annual Christmas party?
...what?
Did they give you a couple Bitcoin in 2011?