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Comment by IvyMike | Hacker News Reader

Funny enough, when the plants show up, in my experience it's a bad sign. I have no proof this conversation happened at the last two places I worked... but I'm pretty sure it did happen.

Upper-level manager #1: "The results of the employee morale survey are back. Morale is at an all time low. The employees feel that upper-level management is clueless, they are increasingly unable to do their jobs efficiently because of process and bureaucracy, and the raises we gave this year were below industry average."

Upper-level manager #2: "I just googled 'how to raise morale' and it said 'plants'"

Upper-level manager #1: "Let's do that!"

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That's probably true as far as it goes, but they probably should have been there all along. If the plants disappear because management decides they are too expensive, start your new job search immediately.

Perhaps the plants should be replacing the management team in that case?

I'd rather the company divide up the plant costs and give it to the employees.

If an individual wants to spend it on a plant for their desk, great.

I feel like this for most benefits btw.

I did a back of the envelope calculation. If we got rid of our plants and plant-waterers, I would expect to see about 60p extra in my monthly salary.

Pre or post-tax?

Post-tax. Fortunately, it doesn't push me into another tax band.

Plants improve morale and productivity. Transparent attempts by management to manipulate their workforce do not :)

Those conversations definitely happen, but usually a knee-jerk reaction to annual employee surveys (and managers can spend a heck of a lot of time spinning results that look bad).

An interesting alternate approach I was privy to and liked joining was a weekly 'spruce up the office meeting' where some of the management team would discuss upcoming holidays (how to best fit employee needs), decorations, budgets allocated to 'team building' events (more often than not - give the staff the money and have them provide a receipt for somewhere they've spent it), who has a birthday coming up, etc. Discussion of plants was included too. Team prizes, award certificates. I definitely recommend trying such a weekly approach and seeing if it works. We did ours on a Friday afternoon, where everyone was itching to get going as it was; pretty fun and relaxed.

The plants tend to appear after the 2nd teambuilding exercise failed.

thats like saying soap causes dirtiness- the plants show up because there is already a problem

They have been a way to try to raise morale without making any meaningful change, addressing root causes, or spending a significant amount of money. If management does address the actual problems and they add plants, that would probably be a good sign--but that's never been my experience.

Couldn't agree more. The best way to increase employee morale is to act on the feedback that employees give you. Benefits, perks, plants – these things don't address the underlying reason of why employees are unhappy to begin with!

In fact, not acting on feedback is also the #1 reason why employees choose not to give feedback in the first place. I wrote a bit about it here & what CEOs + managers can do to actually act on feedback: https://signalvnoise.com/posts/3760-why-we-dont-speak-up-at-...

Hope it's helpful!

i see what your saying- management that uses plants as a solution is probably shitty, so presence of plants increases the likelihood of shitty management. thats a weird thing that should have a name, seems like people in statistics would run into that more than once. so some variable is positively correlated with satisfaction, but also positively correlated with a variable that is negatively correlated with satisfaction, and the negative variable has a stronger magnitude of effect

There's some saying that using a metric for control causes it to lose all useful correlations. (Ie you can only optimize what you measure, but once you optimize, you can no longer trust the measurement.)

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