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?

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mitchellst 34 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

Agreed. 3 things are interesting.

How small the slight is.

How big the effect is.

Meta thing: how the slight is not the kind of thing most managers or executives, or even knowledge workers generally, would care about. (As evidenced by the software people here questioning if a birthday wish is a big deal.)

Lesson: your employees think differently than you. Get curious.

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tetha 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I'm now somewhat interested in the study to see how they accounted for possible hidden factors.

If a team lead or manager spent the time to track birthdays and took time out of their day to have a 10 minute chat with someone on their birthday, they probably exhibit a number of other behaviors that could be summarized as "treating their employees as humans". That's the boss people tend to like to work with and possibly go another mile for them.

If tolerating your boss during a normal day takes 9 of your 12 spoons of energy for the day, it takes very little further push to be spiteful. At worst, they may force you to find another workplace with a better boss.

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dmurray 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

This is a study from an elite institution published in a respectable journal in the social sciences. Certainly they took the time to perform a controlled experiment and assigned managers at random to deliver the birthday cards late or on time. That would be cheap to do and minimally invasive for the human subjects.

[Reads abstract]

They didn't? It's a pure observational study that one measure of sloppiness in the organisation correlates with another? What do we pay these guys for?

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jampekka 5 hours ago | parent [-]

Per abstract it's a "a dynamic difference-in-differences" analysis, which means likely that they see whether the employee behavior changes after the event. But establishing causation with it still requires quite a few assumptions.

PNAS is kinda known for headline grabbing research with at times a bit less rigorous methodology.

https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2017/10/04/breaking-p...

> Certainly they took the time to perform a controlled experiment and assigned managers at random to deliver the birthday cards late or on time. That would be cheap to do and minimally invasive for the human subjects.

If the results are true, it would be actually quite expensive because of the drop in productivity. It could also be a bit of a nightmare to push through ethical review.

	▲	dmurray 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		They could start by observing the rate at which birthday cards are delivered on time, and not vary too much from that. I suppose the impact on productivity isn't known in advance, and it might be that failing to receive a birthday card from a normally diligent manager costs the company more in productivity than it gains from a sloppy manager unexpectedly giving one on time.

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zelphirkalt 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

However, if at some point somehow it shines through, that this is just another checklist being ticked off, without actual sincerity behind it, this all goes down the drain, and the time would be better spent on actual work environment improvements, rather than wet handshakes and pseudo "we are a family".

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ghaff 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I don't really mind but I take a slight objection to supposedly confidential data (like birthday) being widely shared even with good intentions.

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6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

[deleted]

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trollbridge 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Birthdays are hardly confidential.

	▲	ghaff 6 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		They're not really for many people (and, personally, I don't go to any extremes to keep it a secret). But sharing info like that from an HR record without permission feels a bit wrong even if others here obviously disagree.
	▲	Insanity 7 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		It depends on the culture/religion. Not everyone celebrates birthdays. I had multiple ICs ask me not to say public birthday wishes, as they didn’t celebrate their birthday and/or did not want the rest of the team to know.
	▲	DamonHD 7 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		They should be unless you want to publish one of the things that too many (eg sites) regard as a reasonable secondary security verifier.

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maxerickson 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Base rate is likely quite low.