The subject may sound silly, but we evolved this way. For the greatest part of human existence we were part of small social groups. We each took part in every activity. Our 'work' was for the group, and for ourselves. Those we worked with, we lived with, so in order to maintain group cohesion (and to not get stabbed in our sleep) we learned to get along. Current work practices violate a lot of those deeply set social mores. I'd love to see a study that looks into this hypothesis. Could explain a lot of the misery and depression in our modern life.

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 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.

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 all the corporatisms we hear everyday then proceeds to preach them to everyone and waste time anyway. Like, please, I thought we just agreed this is all fluff.

The first two paragraphs of that article are a wild incoherent ride, mixing all kinds of things, that have very little to do with each other (feel slighted [...] even the slightest mistreatment [...] failed to deliver birthday greetings on time)

Regardless of the analysis and without having read the study, I agree with the sentiment in the headline and it's sad agreement that matches my experience: Making employees feel not slighted works really well – for both the company and the employee. It does not require that you respect anyone, and actually often runs counter it.

Once you figure that out as an employer, I can see why you would chose to just get better at fooling and distracting people.

The big concept which needs to be included in this discussion is "payslope" --- for an excellent article on this, and an example of a company which handles this well, see:

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/time-to-lead/h...

I have never regretted a purchase from Lee Valley, and highly recommend all of their products.

> the retail chain, which has a well-established policy that managers hand-deliver a card and small gift to each employee on their birthday.

> The faux pas was never intentional; the managers who were late said they had other priorities.

If it's such a well known company policy and you forget that, it is not a small slight at all.

This article hits close to home. Recently management provided some 'training' for everybody at where i work, specially focused at team leaders/supervisors, about being courteous based on a training that Disney offers around the world. The focus was not only to be courteous to your end-users, but also to those who you manage and are on your team.

I'm really good at my job, and a few years ago i became a supervisor. But not because i was good with people, simply because i am technically competent. My company was (and still is) rather small (less than 20 on the technical side, but almost 200 overall) and there was no one else remotely apt for the job. I was always a 'cold' person, didn't care much about closeness at work, didn't cared about birthdays, company parties (people absolutely love those where i work, and the company spends a good money on it), and i had to make an effort to remind myself to say 'Good morning' to everybody, because it didn't felt necessary. While i treated everybody with the same respect i wished for myself, eventually i found that that wasn't enough. Fast forward a few years i got better at the basics, but I'm still struggling on the people aspect of it. My team's productivity is good and so is mine, everybody receives good pay and they are happy on that aspect. The only reason to why my team may not have fallen apart, is probably because we still closely interact with other people from other teams, who are way better at this.

> "An easy place to start is simply acknowledging what’s important to people outside of their jobs: birthdays, graduations, marriages, a new baby, death of a loved one, or religious observances. Doing so makes them feel valued as human beings, not just human capital."

For a long time i never considered others would find that important, not at the workplace anyway. When you don't care about that stuff yourself, caring for the sake of work feels fake and people can spot it which may backfire. Is it a case of "fake it until you make it", or just brute-force until you get better on it? I admit it is exhausting. I love my work and what i do on the technical side, and i cannot complain about the company or the pay, but i do sometimes regret accepting that offer.

I understand the co-authors are research fellows at the Maximegalon Institute of Slowly and Painfully Working Out the Surprisingly Obvious

Lots of “no shit” in these comments makes me wonder how many VP level managers you guys have interacted with. Maybe it’s just my location, but this is one of those things that legitimately NEVER makes it through to upper managers.

When they tell their base managers to crack the whip and force them to give the whole “you are not working hard enough, tighten up. Shorter lunches, clock in 5 minutes early, etc” speech to the base employees, they will absolutely feel resentment and do LESS work, not more.

For more than one reason.

A quite small few will be pushed over the edge and spend their energy trying to find a new position altogether. But the impact of losing them and having an open position for months will have a huge impact. The impact of losing even a below average worker is nearly always underestimated by uppers who see their 200+ indirects as just numbers on an HR chart. And the employees who hop jobs over bad management are usually in the top half of performance, not bottom.

Another handful of over-achievers will realize that their “extra mile” approach is clearly being ignored or not having any effect, and simply become achievers. This alone can have an impact that outweighs any potential gain from whip cracking.

The one thing that nearly all employees will do when this happens though: talk to each other and bitch about it. This will tank morale yes, but it more literally just takes a bunch of time and energy. A very large distraction from the actual work.

I’ve seen this now at several jobs in a few fields. The negative impact is so much larger than I ever would have guessed starting out.

If you want to get more work out of the same workers, you cannot use negative reinforcement. It will backfire. Positive reinforcement is not bulletproof but rarely makes things WORSE.

Manage smarter not harder.

As a Brit, the birthday card example feels oddly American. The effect seems plausible, but the UK equivalent slight would be something much more informal

Yes. We needed an essay to crack this one

This seems obvious but I guess needs 'official research' to register.

A quote I remember from a coleage - 'They wouldn't give me a pay rate rise, so I gave myself one, by working less hours in a day'

Conversely, I wonder if employers who feel slighted by those employees, pay and promote them less.

On some level the headline is like "yeah, no shit," but the surprising thing is the claimed strength of the effect. 50% absenteeism increase for missing a birthday congratulations? Really?

A good leader believes in the team and the team’s mission.

Celebrating birthdays and milestones are a possible side effect of this, but these celebrations can’t take place of the power of that belief.

If you consistently smile, you can force yourself to be happier, and if you force yourself to celebrate others, that’s still a good thing. But, your team will know if you don’t believe.

You’re better off being Gary Oldman in Slow Horses (only secretly believing in the mission and with a team that all care) than just being in it for the paycheck.

I’m not saying to quit if you can’t believe, but don’t expect top productivity.

I wonder if this is true for PhD students

I just got my annual review and for the 4th year in a row, no changes. I'm still "meeting expectations" but apparently not deserving of even a crumb of the millions in additional profits I've brought in. I am damn sure not going to work as hard going forward when working hard doesn't even lead to a positive outcome. I may not control the scope or even volume of work assigned to me, but I do control the pace and why bother working faster/harder for nothing?

At a company I work for we get b-day cards promptly. They all get sent by workday :) What I found upsets me the most is companies paying no respect to my private time.

They all want me to be on-call and carry my laptop with me. Hiking, on a beach, at a restaurant, sleeping at night – i am expected to be reachable and get on it right away.

Some international companies don't even try to schedule support according to time-zone sighting on-call efficiency and knowledge segregation.

And yet, they fücking refuse every effort developers make to focus on fixing issues leading to incidents.

They fücking need to fix their act.

Thanks professor, my boss didn't believe me when I tried to hint it

Ehrm, actually, it’s better to constantly threaten layoffs and lead by fear. Employees are replaceable cogs who need to prove their value to the business. President Musk has made this very clear and most leaders in big tech (with the notable exception of Tim Cook) have followed suit. This radical approach (based on Jack Welch management principles from the 80s) will certainly yield outstanding business outcomes.

All of the above is sarcastic for those who find it difficult to pick up on tone in text.

Oranges are orange, tonight at 11…

From the further linked https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/when-employees-f... -

> "They found the perfect observational setting in the retail chain, which has a well-established policy that managers hand-deliver a card and small gift to each employee on their birthday. The company designed the policy to foster meaningful personal interactions and strengthen the employee-manager relationship"

> "The team found no issues when cards and gifts were given within a five-day window of the employee’s birthday"

Part of me wonders more now if the slight also comes from the expectation of receiving a gift under this policy? If someone told me "hey, happy birthday, dude" that'd be good enough for me.

That sounds about right from my experience. There's nothing worse than feeling excluded or manipulated by management or coworkers.

A surprising effect, who would imagine it?

So, now we have metrics of what "slighted at work" does to work.

Just like the terrible outcomes of fraud elimination indicate non-zero fraud is preferred, I can see a similar nom-zero dissatisfaction at work the same.

Except now companies can calibrate how much dissatisfaction due to terrible policies can be done in response to lower work quality, and minmax that.

Reading between the lines, the paper is how to manage dissatisfaction in relation to work and cost. In other words, "How bad can we make it for the minimum work product needed?"

As a small business owner who often has to deal with that worst possible ratio 1:1 for management/employee, I can promise you that emoloyees are premptivly looking for reasons to get there digs in, and often show up enacting vengence? in the form of vandalism from day 1. As I have never taken shit from an employer, I walk out and get another job imediatly, I have no sympathy for passive agressives whatsoever and despise the world we have built that can absorb the damage and still net a profit, which of course does not work for small business, so I am becoming very up front with prospective hires, and forceing a conversation about personal expectations and needs, which is very challenging as they have been trained to say whatever is needed to get hired, NOW!, and worry about anything else later.

A lot of work is fake work. It's just social signaling. It's just a game of being liked. Just look at the stats for autistic people who have difficulty finding and maintaining employment, not because they're bad at their actual job but because neurotypical people just don't like them. Anyone who has worked for a remotely large organization has met plenty of people who have been promoted well beyond their actual abilities or output.

In this space you'll often hear about Dunbar's number [1] and the idea that organizations with more than about 150 people tend to break down. In larger organizations, a whole layer of middle management seems to rise up with questionable output. Like you might have no idea who your VP is. One place I worked had the VP visit once a quarter, walk aroudn and ask what people worked on and occasionally yell at them.

The military is an interesting example because it's millions of people, often in confined spaces so a whole bunch of rules have to be created so they don't kill each other, basically. And if you talk to any current or former servicemembers you'll hear stories about how not much gets done there either. Toxic leadership, lots of waiting around for nothing, bureaucracy and so on.

One can view this "research" as "be nice to your employees" but I think it's more nefarious than that. Or at least "be nice" won't be the lesson Corporate America takes from it. Instead it'll be that employees need to be even more closely monitored so they're not slacking off.

I think about what I call "organizational churn". This is where every 6 months you'll get an email saying a VP in your direct chain whom you've likely never met now reports to a different SVP under some restructure or reorganization to "align goals" or for "efficiency".

What you realize after awhile is that organizational churn only exists so nobody is every accountable for their actions or output. They're never in the same place long enough to see the consequences of their action or inaction.

But what I've thought about a lot recently in terms of organization is the Chinese Community Party. Millions of people work for the CCP. Yet it's output has been stunning. Some 40,000km of high speed train lines in 20 years for less than the US spends on the military in one year. Energy projects, metros, bridges, cities, housing, roads, ports, the list goes on.

How does the CCP avoid empire-building, institutional rot and general bureaucratic paralysis?

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number

"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 that when managers at a national retail chain failed to deliver birthday greetings on time, it resulted in a 50% increase in absenteeism and a reduction of more than two working hours per month. "

Most people I know don't care about their birthday (or being recognized) to this extent. Years ago, I worked at a place that decided to celebrate everyone's birthday that week with a cake and a 10/15 minute meeting (usually multiple birthdays were celebrated at the same time). As the company grew, we were having these meetings 3-times per week.

My 6 year old would care if their birthday didn't get recognized and similarly pout all day and seek this type of 'revenge'.

I wouldn't want to work with anyone that did this.

how does most academia ever get funding?

Breaking news: when it rains, people get wet

Is paying $20 to read this the only option?

Worthy of the Ig Nobel. Not surprised it's a management consultant factory in Israel that have uncovered these titillating results.