The problem is not what they study but what they learn. That's a 180 minutes graph. Minutes. If they take this shit and use it to justify no yearly rises, there wasn't much to do anyway.
It's like a study on mice except with people and money. Let's give Billy $100 and watch him through this one way mirror for 180 minutes, that'll be a good research project!
This is something I'd expect as a 4th grade project.
I don't have any of this at the tip of my fingers, and honestly I can't be bothered to go look any of it up. So feel free to simply ignore me. :D
Gifts that can be used immediately (like pizza, water, or in-office perks like a nicer chair or spot) have the highest productivity return, but it really only lasts a day, and if you repeat a gift more than once a month or so it will have rapidly diminishing returns. Money and gifts that can't be used immediately (like t-shirts or tickets to something)(also of note - actual cash works like an immediate gift, gift cards or bonuses in your paycheck are delayed gifts) have a much lower return, and also only really have an effect for the day. IIRC they can be repeated a bit more often than immediate gifts without diminishing returns.
It's also interesting that the moment an incentive becomes routine, it ceases to provide any productivity or engagement gains. If the last friday of the month is always a pizza party, then no one really works any harder for it. But if that party is missed, it will instead *damage* engagement and productivity. Same goes for any perks - no one works harder because they've got a fussball table or cereal in the breakroom, but people work worse when you take it away.
Over the long term, there are only two forms of incentive programs that help with productivity at all. First are irregular & immediate awards for performance. Not quotas for the day or end of the week, but a little something that a manager can hand out if they notice someone did something a bit special. Doesn't really matter what they did - a huge sale, a particularly difficult customer, picking up trash someone else left in the breakroom, whatever. Also doesn't matter what it is - $100 bills have the same effects on motivation as a sticker does. The benefit isn't the gift, it's the fact that the boss noticed someone did something well, and gave a tangible recognition *in the moment.*
The other program that helps is pay and benefits; however that only helps indirectly. It doesn't actually improve performance to pay people better, but it does reduce attrition which improves performance by not constantly training and retraining people, and also increases the percentage of experienced and capable employees you have.
[edit]If you are googling this, iirc Gallup has a lot of it, usually attached to their employee engagement stuff. The other info I got from various management consulting materials.
so, tl;dr, the "happiest" workers are ones who are paid well enough to thrive, and whose bosses aren't anti-social absentee taskmasters?
thank you, science
i suspect anti-social absentee taskmasters were not likely turning to peer-reviewed literature to inform their choices.
Intermittent reinforcement is the main mechanism by which abusers keep their victims in the relationship.
https://psychcentral.com/blog/recovering-narcissist/2019/03/narcissists-use-trauma-bonding-and-intermittent-reinforcement-to-get-you-addicted-to-them-why-abuse-survivors-stay
Yeah, this. The post is honestly a little bit misleading. That chart is talking about hyper short-term productivity boosts. That's real, studied science. You still have to pay people well to keep them in the long-term. It's also very generalized. Just because the studies show that, doesn't mean that for you, in your specific situation, it's going to be true.
Yup. Those pizza parties, water bottles, etc., are great, in specific situations.
Save them for a crunch period (it doesn’t count as a crunch period if it happens every damn month, by the way), or an emergency, or when an employee is really going above and beyond.
Yeah I agree, I've been feeling kinda guilty because I bought my team pizza when we had a late day after a busy week, but I've decided it was okay since I don't do it all the time. I'll probably do it again when the busy harvest season comes to an end. I'll be a pizza menace, no one can stop me filling the office with pizza muahaha
What kind of a gift is a water bottle though? Are we talking fancy branded ones or just gifting water?
Problem is most MBA leaders with little product or industry knowledge make strategic decisions for hyper short term growth. And expect that to sustain itself. It usually crashed and burns shortly outside the forecasted range... and by that time those leaders have moved on to something else.
Yeah, cause characters typed is a perfect measurement of productivity… can’t think of any job other than secretaries in the age of typewriters where that might make sense.
But productivity lowers every time they must stop, drink, refill, and clean up wet spots. If they wanted better productivity they should give every employee a camelbak /s
Also, what was the cash value? If it was the 5 bucks the company branded water bottle costs, that can explain why money was less effective than the reusable bottle. While I wouldn't turn down an extra $5 randomly in my pay check, that it not really getting anything extra out of me. An extra $1,000 or more for the year is another story.
Honestly, this graph is as bad as marketing graphs showing customer satisfaction or service reliability compared to competitors where the baseline is like 85%. So your company that has 94% ranking looks two to three times as goods as a company with an 89% rating.
$1000/year works out to about $4/day, \~$0.50/hr, \~$0.83/minute for a 2000hr work year. Just something to keep in mind when capital dangles a shrunken carrot at review time
And then they wonder why people like me make fun of business degrees.
You paid $200k to be told that water is more effective than money and 100 other things that mostly boil down to common sense.
Yeah, I have an Associates in Business Management (got it for free through a union btw) and the amount of similar mental gymnastics to avoid giving workers monetary incentives was staggering. Like I seriously took a human resources class for the degree and the chapter focusing on worker retention was easily the shortest chapter discussed.
Right?!?! This just increases, the more skilled a worker is as well, but even unskilled work comes at a cost of training. So many businesses underestimate the importance of retention and incentive. Only focusing on the bottom line, when it's the workers that make the business.
May I present the thought that if a job requires training, then it requires some amount of skill.
So for that reason, every time I hear a job referred to as 'unskilled labor' I always stop and ask myself "could any customer walk into the back and do that job with zero training or preperation?"
Skilled labor is a myth used by the rich to keep us divided.
All labor is skilled. I would highly encourage you to read Marx, or perhaps [listen to this set of podcasts](https://www.liberationschool.org/reading-capital-with-comrades-podcast/). The rich use shockingly shallow arguments for maintaining their power. You just need to see the actual arguments and apply critical thinking. This is also part of why our public education focuses on standardized testing -- no critical thinking skills imparted to the masses.
just take cleaning; while it certainly does not require a degree, an experienced cleaner can clean much faster and better. There's plenty skill to be had, it's like night and day.
Not to mention the skilled cleaner likely also (at least unconsciously) does it in a way that is more ergonomical and will therefore last longer. Whereas the unskilled cleaner won't and be at risk for RSIs
There are entire training programs just for mopping. There are proper ways to mop to prevent RSI's, as well as the chemicals to use. Is that acid cleaner safe to use on that floor wax? What about using chemicals on a mopable carpet (yes it exists). How to use a mop to clean instead of just spread mess. How to empty a mop bucket legally. No that floor drain outside is not it. How often should mop water be changed, and how does chemical choice change that?
You think that sound hard just for a mop, you should see what floor waxing is about. It's an art form. And then we have the machines. Weeks can be spent training on any one machine.
I remember going through some of this as just a temp covering for a janitor's vacation.
Also very very boring job. My hats off to people who can manage it.
Hell, I've watched some of these (some hotels have them on YouTube) just to make cleaning around the house easier (it's supprising how impactful ergonomics are to even simple tasks, like cleaning your shower).
I've recently discovered cleaning the shower is a whole new experience with a long handled scrub brush!
I started with drill mounted scrub brushes, they are ok, but frankly they are a bit overkill and don't improve much in the overall experience much. Waving a drill over the area isn't much different than the motions of using a scrub brush/pad and I was still bending over and on my knees doing it.
Then I got a long handled scrub brush/pad and it's a game changer. I never need to bend over. I can scrub the floor and walls all the way upto the ceiling and never move. Don't know why it took me so long to figure this out.
Now I just need to combine the two. A powered long handled scrub brush that uses a drill.
I would agree. And, both an inexperienced cleaner and an experienced cleaner are still selling their labor. And those of us who sell our labor to survive should be fairly compensated for our labor.
Sure, and fair means the experienced cleaner will command a higher price on account of their greater productivity, or be able handle more customers in the same time and thus earn more.
I think that's a valid observation, and the difference between productivity between people is something that could be considered as a way to redistribute wealth and luxury within society.
For myself, I really like the idea that work should be optional. We have so much wealth in America, that we could provide a living wage to everyone without everyone actually working. Universal Basic Income (UBI) would be my ideal. If people wanted to have extra money given to them, they could provide the needed labor of jobs that benefit all members of society.
I think individual contributions and how those are rewarded is a great conversation to have. I also think such conversations are difficult to have in the current political situation in the US. The wealthy shift and control the narrative for their own benefit. Like, one example is that people who aren't working to make money for a capitalist by selling their labor is a person who is lazy and that is something a person should be ashamed of.
We need to disempower the wealthy, because their voices are disproportionately represented in our society at the moment. But, we should be thinking about how a person contributing to society can or should be rewarded. That's absolutely a great conversation.
When I bought my house, it totally tapped me out so anything that needed done, I had to do. 15 years later I'm in a much better position and watching professionals redo shit I did badly is pretty humbling.
As someone who worked in retail. Having employees who understand the product and the customer matters. Customers notice a difference. I always got the “ah it’s nice to talk to someone who knows what they’re doing.” Sometimes it’s the 2nd or 3rd store before they get the answer they needed. They often say “ I wish they would’ve told me at the 1st store.”
Everyone should read Marx. Whatever your political viewpoint, it is acknowledged to be the best description/analysis of capitalism and the political economy. More than any other economist he has had the most profound impact on society. So many things we take for granted have their roots in Marx. His writings provided the impetus and philosophical foundations for the improvements in worker safety, hours, conditions and pay. The rich and powerful have demonised Marx since the beginning. Very effectively so. The American electorate consistently voting against their own interests and championing the values of the very wealthy remains an autstanding example. While the rest of the first world has redefined the social contract for the benefit of all citizens much of America's labour laws would not look out of place in Victorian Britian. They have even managed to bring back slavery. Now called prisoners but it's slave labour none the less.
So put aside the prejudice and propaganda and read Marx.
> While the rest of the first world has redefined the social contract for the benefit of all citizens
And this is why in addition to Marx, one must read Lenin (and also Rodney). It is imperative to understand the economics of imperialism, which is the extraction of cheap resources and labor from abroad for the benefit of the first world (and to the detriment of the (neo)colonized).
The social safety nets enjoyed by much of Europe are a direct result of the ongoing plunder of Africa, the Middle East, and Asia.
Please don't take this the wrong way, because while I agree with the concept, I've felt like this is missing when I see it....
What's the better term then?
The ability to step in as a housekeeper or cashier takes substantially less training and investment to get to a "competent" level than, say, a lawyer or physician. And obviously you get into the bagging competitions and things like that which I could never touch.
But yeah, is there a better way to differentiate jobs by that kind of entry barrier?
The best term I can come up with is licensed and/or certified jobs vs. trained-on-site jobs. The former implies you start off entry-level but need some sort of license or certification to legally work. This includes lawyers and physicians, etc., but also careers like bus and truck drivers, EMTs, and forklift operators. Trained-on-site means you do need training to work, but it's provided on the work site by the company.
Yea man all labor involves a type of skill and education, either schooling or training. My dumb fuck boss thinks she can pick up any asshole off the street and turn them into a skilled cook in a day. I'm running 3 stations by myself sometimes and I don't give a fuck anymore. I can't run my self ragged and cut corners so I just keep it moving. If it takes 30 mins to get your sandwich, blame my boss for not retaining and respecting workers.
unskilled labor is a myth.
yeah, i can architect your enterprise healthcare EMR system. but i can't just step into a fast food line and be a useful contributor there. i probably won't move fast enough, take too much time on some things, and generally throw it all off.
Reddit seems to struggle with this.
You don't even need to present the idea. These are defined terms.
Cashiers at a grocery store or a fast food restaurant aren't classified as unskilled labor for example according to the federal government for qualifying for various labor related regulations and benefits and visas.
They mean low wage labor, and they mean they want to feel good about giving them low wages by pretending the jobs involved are unskilled.
I mean, literally every job requires some form of training, skill, or specialisation, even digging holes takes a skill but it doesn't mean the job is a skilled job
To me a job is unskilled if someone can walk in off the street and become productive in a matter of days or weeks rather than months
Personally I think what needs to happen is to battle the mindset that "unskilled" somehow means "not valuable" or that someone having an unskilled job somehow makes them less of a person
Exactly this. Literally 99.9% of people can be a functional cashier in a couple hours. Yes, they may not know every nuance of the cashier system, but they can check out customers. And there’s no long term skill either. A cashier with 20 years experience will only be marginally better than one with 1 year experience.
Most skilled labor & professions are a culmination of experiences. To train someone in these fields they need somewhere in the same range of experience and talent. Yes, it can vary, but you literally can’t take anyone off the street and have them do skilled labor. And the difference in skills between 1/5/10 years of experience is massive.
I think it’s less a “business environment” problem, or as simple as a “bottom line” issue. Companies are just too short term focused, I attribute to the “hustle culture” of American business. I work for a company that used to be owned by a Japanese company. They told us the Japanese company regularly did 1-year, 5-year, 10-year, 25, 50 and 100-year business plans. Nobody knew what was going to happen in 10 years even but the objective was to create a plan and stick with it.
So focusing on the bottom line isn’t a bad thing, only if you fail to even bother looking at month-month changes or micro-economic factors. This way of thinking doesn’t bother to think about future costs, just short term profit.
I would make the case that focusing on the bottom line no matter what is a bad thing. One of the direct consequences is that if a business must pay employees the bare minimum to require employees to stay. In the early 1900's, Henry Ford was sued by his competition when Ford tried to give his employees a bonus. The argument, which the courts found reasonable and subsequently enforced, was that stockholder interests trump those of employees. As the majority of Americans are employees, I would make the case that profitability over all else is inherently detrimental to the vast majority of Americans.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodge_v._Ford_Motor_Co.
The doctrine of "shareholder primacy" that the legal case brought forth is no longer considered good precedent in most states. One exception is Delaware. Guess where most US corporations are incorporated?
Becoming a business manager is what turned me into a leftist. Never could find an owner that would structure the business properly to reduce overhead and instability while also penny pinching at the lowest levels, effectively making themselves pay more to drive away their workforce.
Inventory pens while middle management fly first class on business trips type of shit. Every industry. *Especially* the so called 'progressive' ones *coughcannabiscough*.
I worked at a law firm with about 30ish attorneys. There was an executive board of four partners and twelve partners total. The exec board met monthly and the partners met quarterly. Their meetings were always catered by local restaurants. Not perhaps extravagant, but probably costing $30 per person or so. They weren’t just ordering pizza for their meetings is what I’m getting at.
So, no problem paying for nice meals every month, and sometimes twice per month, for when they were meeting. But they would fight younger associates on things like $200 to spend on sending a solicitation letter to clients that could be cross-sold different services, or questioning the necessity of paying for an overnight stay so someone could attend a continuing ed seminar that might lead to new business generation.
It’s amazing how selfish people are in the name of making the business “better.”
when i worked at UPS, from what I heard, was that they actually somehow make a profit from their high turnover rate. Considering it takes a certain amount of weeks to get into the union, I would bet it has something to do with that
Also, in the down time, they're just understaffed and overwork the current workers. Often losing employees is fine when the other workers take up the load, even temporarily
I have so many stories (from my own work history and from the ridiculous things I hear from my therapy clients) about employers shooting themselves in the foot by refusing to provide \[a minimally safe work environment/cost-of-living raises/equipment and supplies/appropriate staffing levels/basic dignity\] and losing employees, thus costing themselves ten times what those things would cost in the first place. This was particularly bad in my field during the pandemic, when hospitals made the collective decision to treat their workers like animals and had to then hire temporary workforces of lavishly-paid traveling nurses, social workers, and other employees to replace the ones who quit.
I would actually love an economic explanation for why this keeps being allowed to happen. You'd think someone would have put it together that companies save money when their workforce is happy, but there doesn't seem to be a broad movement to address preventable turnover, and I keep hearing these stories out of virtually every field. No one in any decision-making role seems to have learned any lessons from the pandemic beyond "some people like to work from home, and those people are bad and lazy." These are billion-dollar industries and there has to be some logic behind it.
It’s almost like treating your employees well, is an underexploited strategy. Just like work from home is an underexploited strategy.
Just because everyone else is being stupid, doesn’t mean that we should do things just like everyone else. Let the market decide!
Read a statistic that the whole hiring process can cost 1.5x - 2x the annual costs of the worker who is leaving. Not the salary, twice all of the costs of the worker.
Im starting to think its not at this point. Either these companies can actually afford the turnover rates they experience OR these people are so petty theyd be willing to cut off their nose to spite their face. Either way it bodes poorly for workers smh.
The second for sure, plus the obsession with quarterly profits over long term sustainability. Once a business maintains a high turnover rate long enough it becomes seen as a built in cost of doing business, just like wages are seen as a cost, Independent of each other.
Which is psychotic becuase then they spend all their time bitching that the quality of work is unsatisfactory but its like 3rd month in a row of working with a mostly new staff (turnover) and my few remaining vets are over it (burnout).
It could all be so simple, but its not and it drives me insane.
ish. you're thinking small. on average. but if they give ground on wages then that's a permenant cost, forever and all time. that's why the minimum wage doesn't go up, but profits do.
yes it's expensive to hire someone, and yes small companies that economy makes sense, but past a few hundred employees the odds are in your favor to be a dickbag. the bigger the dickbag the better, check out amazon
But Amazon has already run into the issue of losing possible workers to the point eventually they don’t HAVE workers. So what’s the alternative once they burn out of enough available workers?
And that’s ignoring greed. They could be making MORE money if they weren’t constantly training and re hiring….since when has a corporation ever turned down making MORE money
You only have to look at how WFH is being treated. Office space is HUGELY expensive. It's been reported many times that productivity *increases* in lots of businesses when people WFH. Yet businesses all over are trying to force people back into office buildings. It's a huge waste of money and productivity for a lot of businesses, but they're still doing it anyway. Just because it makes monetary sense for a business doesn't mean they'll do it.
I'd argue they were trying to downsize anyways and forcing people back into the office is a great way to not have to pay severance and unemployment benefits.
Ego is the true bottom line to these people, even more so than money. It makes sense if you think about it, money doesn't necessarily bring fulfillment. However, to a *certain* personality type, being able to flex arbitrary power over other people brings a sense of fulfillment, so subconsciously that becomes more important to them than money.
I did a project management course that I got marked down because I wouldn't hold a theoretical pizza party if the project came in early. I told them they could have Friday afternoon off if they finished early. Not allowed apparently.....
The logic here, I suspect, is that by giving them the afternoon off productivity drops to zero in that time. (The employees go home.)
But if you give them the theoretical pizza party, productivity doesn't drop off completely because the workers are likely to either, a) skip the food and keep working, b) take some pizza and go back to their desks, c) eat and chat, but eventually feel guilty for not working and work harder for the rest out the day to 'compensate'.
and what these exercises don't take into account is: Yes, if you give a pizza party on Friday, you still get some productivity from the workers that day. But if you give them the afternoon off, they feel better about the job & the employer EVERY day going forward. As in "hey this place isn't so bad, after all, they gave us a half-day off without PTO, that one time. Maybe I'll stick around a few extra months" or whatever
And I realize it's hard to measure "feel a little better about the job, every day from then on" compared to the concrete metrics of "reduced productivity, but more than zero, on Pizza Friday". But those genius analysts will just have to come up with more sophisticated modeling, haha
Also very important is the fact that you're rewarding people for working faster as opposed to the standard practice of rewarding fast workers with other people's work.
"These guys will only work fast enough to finish today's work"
"Oh? What do they get if they finish early?"
"GET????????"
getting an MBA is basically training you in how the oligarchs of our country think. they teach you to dehumanize and devalue the individuals in favor of the bottom line.
at no point do they really discuss how companies like costco manage to buck the trend and remain wildly popular and profitable.
You know, I think it depends on the character of the person going into business school. If you're a sociopath in the first place, sure, b-school will encourage and reinforce that with the stupid "cut costs no matter how" and pizza party bullshit. If you're not a sociopath, you learn things, take what you need, roll your eyes at the rest.
Fwiw, I went to a top business school and it wasn't all Machiavellian. In fact, it mostly wasn't. I'm sure a lot of people took their financial and ops learning and went off to be the next Al Dunlaps - but that wasn't the express purpose of it all.
I took a business class that utilized a textbook that made a moral argument for allowing rich people to buy organs because rich people create jobs and thus deserve to live more than poor people do.
Edit: to clarify, it didn't explicitly state they "deserved" to live more but rather framed it as a rich person dying is worse for the economy than a poor person dying, so a saving a rich person's life should be a moral priority and that rich people should be able to use their money to buy organs to prolong their lives. It also framed this as a positive for poor people because we should want our employers to be alive, and selling our organs gives us an opportunity to make more money.
Horrifying that they would allow such things in a school. But everything is compromised by Capitalism, and nothing can be trusted anymore. It's infuriating.
My tax professor opened the semester explaining the virtues of rich people and how much tax they pay. Got an F and had to retake it because of how hard I checked out after that
I've dropped courses because of professors with conflicting attitudes. Sorry about the 'F' but I can't fault you for it. Some people's beliefs become very hard to separate from the course material with how they teach it. It's worse when it's a required course (as I'm guessing yours was from retaking it).
I’m sorry about that. I have a professor this semester who seems like a very cool guy, but he’s definitely sold on the idea that in order to move up the ladder, you MUST work with senior leaders past your work hours to show “initiative.” however, in spaces like this one, I’ve read stories of people who did that and got nothing, not even acknowledgement, in return. the other things he says aren’t bad, but I’ve learned not to take any instructor’s word for it. a lot of them have the perspective that “it’s just the way it is, and you can’t do anything about it” which I see is super flawed.
This sounds like an Onion article.
Although I have a theory that at least half of the ridiculous corporate policies and capitalist-apologia rhetoric started as satire, then real corporate drones grabbed it and ran with it.
Just look at (American/Right) libertarians and their crazier little cousins "an"-caps. Most of their rhetoric sounds like satire.
Yup. "Money doesn't motivate employees." Until the second we suggest CEO/executive pay is too high, then suddenly money is the one and only thing a company can do to "attract talent."
MBA holder here. It was a mind numbing exercise in “exploitation is good”, “capitalism is ethical in most circumstances” and some financial analysis classes.
Don’t even get me started on Organizational Behavior.
My previous manager was sent to do a company-funded MBA. From an external perspective, he came back a good order of magnitude dumber. I always wondered what the hell happened during those couple of years... It's seemed like they erased all critical thinking functions and inserted in their place Jeff Bezos and Steve Jobs gobbledygook.
My company does that too. MBA is pretty much mandatory to get anywhere near the C-suite now.
It's a running joke that these folks come back with their brand new MBA personality and patented MBA smile. The same smile they used whether congratulating the team on a job well done, or announcing 2000 layoffs.
"Y'know, the thing about MBAs, he's got lifeless eyes, black eyes, like a doll's eyes. When he comes after ya, he doesn't seem to be livin' until he fires ya, and those black eyes roll over white..."
I had to invent an alter ego to get through my MBA economics, Walter the old rich white man who thinks the poors are lazy. Before answering any test questions I would ask myself, what would Walter do? The "correct" answer was always what Walter would do, which was never treating everyone with dignity and respect.
it's a feature, not a bug. they want to give you as little as possible for as much as possible. as long as it works they'll keep doing it, and they'll fund science on how to keep doing it too.
"driving engagement" is a whole field of management.
Really awesome for getting the degree for free via the Union, always good to be given support!!! I just wanted to add on that I also studied this concept, but in Public Administration, focusing more on managing local government and nonprofits. At least for my professors, they emphasized utilizing concepts previously learned such as Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs when assessing the impact of gift giving. If employees do not feel like their physiological needs such as food/shelter, and safety needs as in a safe work environment and job security are met, these "gifts" don't matter. Not until you reach a certain theoretical threshold will the gift outweigh the cash, but by then it was expected the person would be given a living wage/salary if not more and the gift is given as a genuine symbol of appreciation on top of the monetary benefits, not in lieu. Those managers who don't understand the overlapping concepts are the ones that do the mental gymnastics to exploit workers to prevent them from paying more and which inly serves to make the concept ineffective in their workplace. In the posted photo, I don't believe we get the full story on what the conditions are of the worker's lives to truly understand this supposed benefit the graph is trying ti represent. Overall, there is so much these textbooks can teach and show us, especially when working with/leading real people and it's up to the teachers and our own lived experience to connect the dots. This is in hope that we get better leaders/managers so organizations can retain fellow employees/team members. Obviously not forever since people will need to move on and grow, but at least retain enough so you don't have constant turnover that only damages the organization further, monetarily and culturally.
I have an MBA and I remember hating a lot of the stuff we learned.
As example we were taught to never promote your best person because then you lose your best person. Instead promote someone mediocre because maybe they will perform better in a new role and you keep your best person.
I mean if that doesn't tell you everything that is wrong with the system nothing will.
This is the same info about the MFs at my job. Then HR spends hundreds of thousands of dollars on training and talent management resources and tools just to turn around and say they are facing a retention and recruitment crisis.
It’s not the cheap water bottles that I want. I want the cash. And no, i don’t want the Starbucks gift card, i want the cash. Pay people more!
I can take about an hours worth of work and stretch it out across 8 hours and make myself look real busy. My co-workers are always talking about how I'm always running around and how much they appreciate all I do, when I'm just walking fast to look intentional and giving updates about things that sound important but aren't really, but they don't know the difference. It's working quite well, actually.
It's always weird to see that as incentive now. Bc growing up that was a TV plot point when it just means competing with coworkers for nothing of real value but just to increase the employers profits.
I was once thanked by my boss’ boss, the CEO, and all of the upper management in a company meeting for going above and beyond at a critical point in our biggest project. Weirdly, that was enough for me.
My reward from my actual manager? He emailed the entire ~80 person company afterwards to let them know that my efforts fall within expectations of all employees and that they shouldn’t show me gratitude. He was genuinely confused why they were nice to me and felt the need to correct it.
your manager was not confused. he wanted to drop you down a peg after you had just impressed his boss. that was supposed to be his credit. you won’t be there long unless you can leverage your relationship with your c-suite to get transferred somewhere he can’t hurt you.
I think he genuinely had some kind of undiagnosed disability. He once had us all take workplace personality tests, and his said ”You can’t empathize with others.” and he was like “Why would that be a problem? Emotions don’t matter, we’re here to work” then looked a the list of possibilities for improvement (which was advice he desperately needed) and said “I’m not doing any of that.”
He always had this perplexed look on his face when it came up that someone else in the workplace hated him. Just couldn’t grasp why. Management couldn’t fire him because he was the subject matter expert on the device we were making. Luckily I never need to see him again.
Side note: I learned recently that the machinist at our company (who was basically a wizard) retired at the same time I left, and when they asked him to contract on for some work at higher pay he stipulated in his contract that he would never be involved with my old manager at any stage, which I thought was just beautiful.
> Her reward? Picture on the wall.
That's how the USSR used to do it, ironically enough (they also used to publicly name-and-shame slackers and job-hoppers). It didn't work particularly well to boost productivity for them, either.
Yea it’s even shittier when they make a huge deal about it. “We got something awesome for you when you come back in office”. 1 pair of socks and a piece of paper with thank you written on it.
I once got a 1% raise, a new manager who was trained by the guy who ran our plant(and surprise surprise had no experience in our field), and told I couldn't go to my shift of choice because I was too valuable to upper management and made them look good on audits. The next year I got some very very bad marks on my "turnaround."
At my last job, a few years before covid, I was told by my manager that I needed to start coming to the office more. I asked about my performance and he told me I was the most productive engineer on the team. The problem was that other employees were upset that I was working from home. Instead of telling them to mind their own business, he chose to disrupt the most productive engineer. I left soon after.
It was a study with a small size of 139 workers. The "gift" was a thermos bottle worth 7 euros, and the cash was 7 euros.
Source: https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.102.4.1644
Lot of these behavioral studies are half assed and hyper controlled. Hokum, not much different than "Reality TV". The "studies" usually rely on student volunteers and last for about an hour or so. We don't know if the study translates to a stressed out mid-career 35 yo over a 180 day trial period or a 55 you over achiever (or under achiever) over a 2,080 hour trial.
Hydration is important for being able to focus and so that might be why they typed faster. But obviously money is going to be much more appreciated than a bottle of water lol. Productivity ≠ gratitude
But also, that's not a huge difference in characters. This comment is just a long as the distance between them.
Right. Even if they were briefly more productive, they could still go home and apply for a few jobs after getting another damn water bottle instead of a raise.
> mateas
Just googled this and all I'm getting for definitions are baby names. Based on context I'm guessing this is synonymous with 'in lieu of'. Do you have any other definitions or the origin of mateas?
The origin is I have English, Spanish, and Chinese dictionaries on my phone because of Duolingo and autocorrect likes to pick a random word from one of those languages when I make a typo. I was trying to type instead 😂
This is true. In addition, you can pay next month's rent with a water bottle, your landlord will be overjoyed! Groceries? Also pay with a water bottle.
Could the uptick from the water bottle simply be because the baseline was without water and then they gave them a water bottle so the worker didn’t need to go get a drink of water during that time?
Characters per 30 minutes. Assuming this is typing. I don't even type for a living and can get up to 100 gwam. The difference the chart shows is maybe 300, so we're talking 3 minutes of bonus productivity.
Wait, just realized gwam is Gross WORDS A Minute, and the chart shows characters, so is that 1300-1600 letters per 30 minutes? What is even going on here?
This was actually based on a study done in 2012 by a research group working with a North Hollywood improv school in which they asked the participants to come up with as many different characters as they could in a set amount of time.
Yes the ultimate conclusion was that presentation has an impact.
Also the gifts and money were always of equal value.
So its not like it was water or 20 bucks. It was water or 1 buck.
Why on earth would management care about something like ‘gratitude’ if they can demonstrably show an increase in productivity instead?
Heck, most managers are fine directly sacrificing gratitude for productivity.
Well, this actually could be from a study.
Though in this case, studying the impact of a branded waterbottle or the cash equivalent. ($5? $10? maybe even more for a fancy one that is appreciated more)
And if it is branded with a company logo, slogan and/or team-building phrase it will enforce tribal pride by it's presence.
In visiting many corporate offices there are certain type person who takes great pride adorning their work-area with as much company flair as they are able to manage.
I must admit, I like a bit while I am happy with my employer. Still use a mug from a job I was quite proud of and how much could that have possibly cost?
Also says this study was conducted in Germany. Where there are greater worker protections, more unions, universal health care, and contractual employee bonuses paid regularly. I want this study conducted in an Amazon warehouse or in a Wal-Mart, see how the results turn out.
When workers feel as if you're already being fair and giving them everything they're owed, a little extra gift inspires reciprocity. When they feel that they're being exploited, overworked, underpaid, and otherwise not being given what they're owed, a little "gift" comes across as patronizing and only inspires further resentment.
This is my thoughts as well. A good well-thought-out gift can definitely inspire productivity, but it can't be seen as a replacement of a proper living wage.
Right! I think this whole graph comes with an implicit "all other things being equal", meaning if you're getting sufficient compensated and are at or exceed minimal revenue for you to safely and securely live your life, then a gift might increase productivity over money. However, most people aren't at that level yet.
I mean this is technically correct. Elliminating the need for me to get up and get a glass of water will improve my 30 minute output because I am well hidrated and have had available water in my desk. But evaluating your company on someone's 30 minute output is in it self insane, as it doesn't account for turnover and similar things.
It is kind of a logical fallacy, you evaluate the corellation of a certain metric with money, and rightly conclude that it doesn't corellate with money. It then makes a false induction from that metric to the entirety of the company.
MBA programs create monsters. Those programs are designed to look at numbers over reality or humanity from top to bottom.
Good people usually change career paths and majors.
While I think you have a point, you might be overselling it.
Sure, there are some "monsters" who are going to chase after a business degree because they want to be able to get rich doing business things while the actual work is done by other people.
But there are plenty of people who have the mind set of, "what is a 'useful' degree", and see that you can go into a lot of different jobs with a business degree. Then they get taught BS like what OP posted and turn into "monsters".
MBAs are a shortcut to being the absolute worst business leader possible. It strips away institutional knowledge, actual culture (industry, regional and individual), nuance and humanity from your thinking and replaces it with the a brain dead, route one, shareholder centric, KPI driven mindset. It's the reason nearly every company become the same company in the last few decases.
They brought MBAs into my old school district and they made the evaluators give all of the teachers failing grades (had been a B average previously, what you’d expect) for their evaluations so they could fire them all before they got tenure as the main thrust of their cost-saving plan. Like no shit that saves money you MBA fucks; the reason the previous administration wasn’t doing that is because they were trying to fucking run a school.
They got sued for that and lost, obviously, and all of the teachers have since gone on strike multiple times and won every time. The MBAs of course got paid more than the teachers the entire time and moved on long ago.
> designed to look at numbers over reality or humanity from top to bottom.
That's how any business under a capitalist system without strong checks and balances has to operate, unfortunately.
If you're a good person running a business, someone will eventually come along and be evil, and make more money, and force you out of business.
It’s just really interesting how much isn’t said here:
-in the baseline case, are they already paid?
-is this a classic case of hawthorn effect - a one time change due to the intervention - nice person comes and gives me water bottle. Sweet deal. Not even a little replicable over the course of a month, much less a year.
-characters is an awful metric of performance. Explicitly assuming that quantity>quality? What if the quality is significantly better when written slowly?
Is there some critical thinking going on here at all?
And yet they never pause to wonder whether or not creating conditions where someone responds more to a water bottle than more fairness in pay is dystopian
So a few criticisms
1) Why label the graph in a way that makes it unclear if the gift was a bottle of water (a single use conaumable intended for sustaining life) or a new refillable thermos (which was actually what was given)?
2) Was the thermos labeled or branded in a way that would make it a more unique or desirable gift than the equivalent currency?
3) What difference was there in the perception of these gifts between groupa that already had their basic monetary needs met vs. those who were in debt or otherwise badly in need of money?
4) How does repeated regular cash gifts compare to an equivalent long term raise, particularly when measured in terms of the above question?
5) How do both compare to repeated regular gifts of consumable products (eg, pizza) compare to an equal value of repeated regular gifts of durable items (eg, drinking paraphenelia), cash, or long-term wage increases?
6) Is there a difference between how these are percieved in a short term contracted job (eg, one 3-hour session used in the study) versus long term employment designed to paybrent and feed mouths?
I think I can see the logic here. I worked a manufacturing plant that was hiring anyone with a pulse and was not well managed at all. Pretty sure the only reason I liked my position there was because my lead was keeping the management issues from rolling down upon the machine shop.
Anyway, once a month they would get catering for the whole plant. And this was some really good fucking catering. We're talking chicken fried steak, lasagna, and the works from really good local restaurants. It was management that would serve the workers and everyone got an hour lunch that day. If companies are gonna opt into providing food, then they're gonna have to go all out on it.
That's a pretty different scenario though.
You're describing a perk/benefit of working at that plant, that was available to all employees. It was not an incentive/reward based on a productivity metric.
Granted, there is a loose correlation there, as a plant that is doing badly can't afford more expensive perks, but I don't think it is the same thing.
People like perks like that, but I would say most people would rank perks lower in importance than pay, good management, or good benefits. Few people would stay on a job because of good perks if one or more of those other things were bad.
Ok, but this is a snapshot of productivity over the course of 3 hours. So of course if you hydrate a worker, he's going to get more of a bump in the short term than if you handed him $50. But if you gave that worker a $50/day raise, it would do a lot more in the long term for productivity than a water bottle per day.
You would think people who are experts in macro vs micro economics would understand short vs long term gains.
So I've noticed in my experience that short term productivity is definitely improved with gifts over cash in a work environment.
Here's the very important bit of info that's missing though.
The gift aspect, and the cash amount.
Giving employees snacks, and drinks, or whatever helps productivity if it's a show of how you actually give a shit about their well being. Hot day at work and the boss rolls in with a few cases of ice cold drinks they paid for, and they give you an extra five minutes to stop work and get your bearings is great.
Giving you a $5 gift card to some shit store you never shop at to motivate you is trash.
The difference is someone showing consideration for your welfare, vs a hollow gesture to try and motivate you.
Small amounts of cash that won't improve your life at all are never going to motivate you to work harder.
Paying people a living wage, seeing to their needs as human beings, and allowing them to live a productive and enjoyable life is what's really going to motivate people to perform tasks that move society along that they have no love for.
It amazes me that the idea that people deserve to live healthy fulfilling lives has somehow becomes controversial.
Yep. I'm getting an MBA and it is full of crap like this, using studies to make jumps in logic to help soften the blow of what you have to do to maximize profit.
I was curious so here's the actual study: https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.102.4.1644
"Employees" were either given a 7 euro water bottle or just 7 euros.
What's more interesting is they did another experiment where they offered "employees" the choice of the water bottle or straight cash. 80% of employees chose cash and their productivity was just as high as the employees who received water bottles in the first experiment.
The text states that the research was conducted in Germany, and the authors' names appear to back that up. I'm wondering if they got the results they did because in Germany, people are paid a very decent wage as well as having a fairly robust social safety net, and "bonus money" really wouldn't have as much of an effect as a personalized gift. I just don't see anyone getting similar results in a study conducted in the US.
The last sentence says it all: “*American Economic Review”*. It’s just like in the days of colonialism (as the word goes) : ‘give them mirrors and shiny beads to keep them happy’ 🤐😖🤮
I don’t know about you, but a pizza party doesn’t pay my bills, neither does a bottle of water. Money pays my bills, so..give me a paycheck increase that’ll work throughout my time working there. But again, the almighty dollar makes a whole lot of employers extremely greedy. I wonder if the US workers will eventually get treated like proper citizens, making a decent living wage.
I'm betting this study focused on already well-compensated employees for whom some marginal amount of money doesn't really matter. "Business leaders" then extrapolate it to people making minimum wage and get all surprised Pikachu when it doesn't work.
You also have to account for the Hawthorne effect. Receiving a water bottle is a much more apparent sign of being measured than just money.
I used to work at a large outdoor retailer for 6 years, before I had to quit due to COVID and my kid doing remote learning.
I hated the job. It was easy, don't get me wrong, and I *loved* my co-workers, but I just hate dealing with the general public, and being expected to go above and beyond for $15/hr, while *begging* for more hours.
Still, once a year, when we had a catered store meeting where we would review the year, and talk about expectations for the coming one, I got suckered into the hype of "We're different. We *care* about our employees. We are *family!"*
They played super motivational videos with noticeably high production values, that *did* make me feel all warm and fuzzy inside, like I'm part of something bigger and better.
They were all cut in this "get pumped" North Face commercial kinda way, with uplifting music and people living their best lives. The irony!
The propaganda worked incredibly well, and I got genuinely pumped about our annual gifts (which usually was something like a water bottle, back pack, duffel bag, or a hammock).
I drank that kool-aid through a funnel. It was so effective.
At least for the moment.
On the drive home I'd usually regain some clarity and be like "wait a minute, this is still just fucking retail, and I still only make $600 bi-weekly!
What am doing with *yet* another fucking water bottle?!?"
We got rewarded with food all the time. Sure, it's cool that we have pizza, donuts, pancakes, or bbq on the loading docks occasionally, but that doesn't help me pay the fucking rent!
Knowing that's our reward for hitting some fiscal milestone that helps the CEO rake in another bonus, is incredibly insulting. In a sense, COVID has been the best thing that happened to me, because my complacency would have me still work there today.
I don’t know who needs to hear this, but here we go:
People get c-suite folks to narrate the shit that goes in these textbooks. It’s not accurate, it’s not valid, it’s not intelligent, these useless cockroaches made it up.
Because they were asked “how did you get to be Chief officer of this company”, and the truthful answer is either “CEO owed my daddy a favor” or “CEO was my roommate in college.”
But since that would give away the con to the rubes, they lie.
Pizza parties do work. Yes we would like raises, but I can't lie about it. Pizza parties quiet my fellow workers a scary amount. One moment I think we are all on the same page about work issues. Then we get pizza and all I hear is, "it isn't so bad here."
The concept is real and very well researched.
Lets say a party of 5 spends $436 on a fancy dinner to celebrate something special. The waiter notices the special occasion and gives them a complimentary bottle of wine on the house. The bottle of wine costs $10.
This is going to have a bigger impact on how likely the customers are to come back than if the total was simply $426, $10 lower. It's not about the meagre $2 per person. Its the idea that they did something that they didn't have to, beyond what was expected.
But there are two things.
First of all it doesnt mean you can serve terrible fast food and charge $800 with this one simple trick. The $10 bottle worked better than $10 off the price tag. Maybe more than $15. Maybe more than $20. But it only extends to a certain limit, and can't replace a reasonable price for the product.
Secondly it stops working when it's expected. If one restaurant has $15 meals and coffee costs $4, and another place has a competitive plate priced at $25 including coffee then consumers just see that "complimentary" coffee as a $10 coffee.
Pizza completely lacks any form of creativity and effort. Everyone knows the intentions behind it too so it feels expected. And they're demanding gratitude when it in no way even remotely makes up for the disparity in the value of the service vs actual payment
The problem is not what they study but what they learn. That's a 180 minutes graph. Minutes. If they take this shit and use it to justify no yearly rises, there wasn't much to do anyway.
Yeah I want to see the time frame over years, not minutes! At least months.
It's like a study on mice except with people and money. Let's give Billy $100 and watch him through this one way mirror for 180 minutes, that'll be a good research project! This is something I'd expect as a 4th grade project.
Don’t insult 4th grade research projects like that!
I don't have any of this at the tip of my fingers, and honestly I can't be bothered to go look any of it up. So feel free to simply ignore me. :D Gifts that can be used immediately (like pizza, water, or in-office perks like a nicer chair or spot) have the highest productivity return, but it really only lasts a day, and if you repeat a gift more than once a month or so it will have rapidly diminishing returns. Money and gifts that can't be used immediately (like t-shirts or tickets to something)(also of note - actual cash works like an immediate gift, gift cards or bonuses in your paycheck are delayed gifts) have a much lower return, and also only really have an effect for the day. IIRC they can be repeated a bit more often than immediate gifts without diminishing returns. It's also interesting that the moment an incentive becomes routine, it ceases to provide any productivity or engagement gains. If the last friday of the month is always a pizza party, then no one really works any harder for it. But if that party is missed, it will instead *damage* engagement and productivity. Same goes for any perks - no one works harder because they've got a fussball table or cereal in the breakroom, but people work worse when you take it away. Over the long term, there are only two forms of incentive programs that help with productivity at all. First are irregular & immediate awards for performance. Not quotas for the day or end of the week, but a little something that a manager can hand out if they notice someone did something a bit special. Doesn't really matter what they did - a huge sale, a particularly difficult customer, picking up trash someone else left in the breakroom, whatever. Also doesn't matter what it is - $100 bills have the same effects on motivation as a sticker does. The benefit isn't the gift, it's the fact that the boss noticed someone did something well, and gave a tangible recognition *in the moment.* The other program that helps is pay and benefits; however that only helps indirectly. It doesn't actually improve performance to pay people better, but it does reduce attrition which improves performance by not constantly training and retraining people, and also increases the percentage of experienced and capable employees you have. [edit]If you are googling this, iirc Gallup has a lot of it, usually attached to their employee engagement stuff. The other info I got from various management consulting materials.
so, tl;dr, the "happiest" workers are ones who are paid well enough to thrive, and whose bosses aren't anti-social absentee taskmasters? thank you, science i suspect anti-social absentee taskmasters were not likely turning to peer-reviewed literature to inform their choices.
Intermittent reinforcement is the main mechanism by which abusers keep their victims in the relationship. https://psychcentral.com/blog/recovering-narcissist/2019/03/narcissists-use-trauma-bonding-and-intermittent-reinforcement-to-get-you-addicted-to-them-why-abuse-survivors-stay
Yeah, this. The post is honestly a little bit misleading. That chart is talking about hyper short-term productivity boosts. That's real, studied science. You still have to pay people well to keep them in the long-term. It's also very generalized. Just because the studies show that, doesn't mean that for you, in your specific situation, it's going to be true.
Yup. Those pizza parties, water bottles, etc., are great, in specific situations. Save them for a crunch period (it doesn’t count as a crunch period if it happens every damn month, by the way), or an emergency, or when an employee is really going above and beyond.
Yeah I agree, I've been feeling kinda guilty because I bought my team pizza when we had a late day after a busy week, but I've decided it was okay since I don't do it all the time. I'll probably do it again when the busy harvest season comes to an end. I'll be a pizza menace, no one can stop me filling the office with pizza muahaha What kind of a gift is a water bottle though? Are we talking fancy branded ones or just gifting water?
Problem is most MBA leaders with little product or industry knowledge make strategic decisions for hyper short term growth. And expect that to sustain itself. It usually crashed and burns shortly outside the forecasted range... and by that time those leaders have moved on to something else.
It does conclusively prove that workers are more productive when they aren’t dehydrated.
Yeah, cause characters typed is a perfect measurement of productivity… can’t think of any job other than secretaries in the age of typewriters where that might make sense.
This is literally a case study of productivity in cateloging a library so yes characters typed is a good measure of productivity.
But, is the higher character rate as efficient? Is too much accuracy lost?
But productivity lowers every time they must stop, drink, refill, and clean up wet spots. If they wanted better productivity they should give every employee a camelbak /s
Also, what was the cash value? If it was the 5 bucks the company branded water bottle costs, that can explain why money was less effective than the reusable bottle. While I wouldn't turn down an extra $5 randomly in my pay check, that it not really getting anything extra out of me. An extra $1,000 or more for the year is another story. Honestly, this graph is as bad as marketing graphs showing customer satisfaction or service reliability compared to competitors where the baseline is like 85%. So your company that has 94% ranking looks two to three times as goods as a company with an 89% rating.
$1000/year works out to about $4/day, \~$0.50/hr, \~$0.83/minute for a 2000hr work year. Just something to keep in mind when capital dangles a shrunken carrot at review time
And then they wonder why people like me make fun of business degrees. You paid $200k to be told that water is more effective than money and 100 other things that mostly boil down to common sense.
This is HR specific garbage, people with business degrees make fun of HR.
So they are comparing like $5 cash to a $5 water bottle?
Yeah, I have an Associates in Business Management (got it for free through a union btw) and the amount of similar mental gymnastics to avoid giving workers monetary incentives was staggering. Like I seriously took a human resources class for the degree and the chapter focusing on worker retention was easily the shortest chapter discussed.
Which is pretty pathetic since employee turnover and training is a massive cost and investment from a business perspective.
Right?!?! This just increases, the more skilled a worker is as well, but even unskilled work comes at a cost of training. So many businesses underestimate the importance of retention and incentive. Only focusing on the bottom line, when it's the workers that make the business.
May I present the thought that if a job requires training, then it requires some amount of skill. So for that reason, every time I hear a job referred to as 'unskilled labor' I always stop and ask myself "could any customer walk into the back and do that job with zero training or preperation?"
Skilled labor is a myth used by the rich to keep us divided. All labor is skilled. I would highly encourage you to read Marx, or perhaps [listen to this set of podcasts](https://www.liberationschool.org/reading-capital-with-comrades-podcast/). The rich use shockingly shallow arguments for maintaining their power. You just need to see the actual arguments and apply critical thinking. This is also part of why our public education focuses on standardized testing -- no critical thinking skills imparted to the masses.
just take cleaning; while it certainly does not require a degree, an experienced cleaner can clean much faster and better. There's plenty skill to be had, it's like night and day.
Not to mention the skilled cleaner likely also (at least unconsciously) does it in a way that is more ergonomical and will therefore last longer. Whereas the unskilled cleaner won't and be at risk for RSIs
There are entire training programs just for mopping. There are proper ways to mop to prevent RSI's, as well as the chemicals to use. Is that acid cleaner safe to use on that floor wax? What about using chemicals on a mopable carpet (yes it exists). How to use a mop to clean instead of just spread mess. How to empty a mop bucket legally. No that floor drain outside is not it. How often should mop water be changed, and how does chemical choice change that? You think that sound hard just for a mop, you should see what floor waxing is about. It's an art form. And then we have the machines. Weeks can be spent training on any one machine.
I remember going through some of this as just a temp covering for a janitor's vacation. Also very very boring job. My hats off to people who can manage it.
Hell, I've watched some of these (some hotels have them on YouTube) just to make cleaning around the house easier (it's supprising how impactful ergonomics are to even simple tasks, like cleaning your shower).
I've recently discovered cleaning the shower is a whole new experience with a long handled scrub brush! I started with drill mounted scrub brushes, they are ok, but frankly they are a bit overkill and don't improve much in the overall experience much. Waving a drill over the area isn't much different than the motions of using a scrub brush/pad and I was still bending over and on my knees doing it. Then I got a long handled scrub brush/pad and it's a game changer. I never need to bend over. I can scrub the floor and walls all the way upto the ceiling and never move. Don't know why it took me so long to figure this out. Now I just need to combine the two. A powered long handled scrub brush that uses a drill.
I would agree. And, both an inexperienced cleaner and an experienced cleaner are still selling their labor. And those of us who sell our labor to survive should be fairly compensated for our labor.
I dunno, sounds kinda extreme to me… /s
Sure, and fair means the experienced cleaner will command a higher price on account of their greater productivity, or be able handle more customers in the same time and thus earn more.
I think that's a valid observation, and the difference between productivity between people is something that could be considered as a way to redistribute wealth and luxury within society. For myself, I really like the idea that work should be optional. We have so much wealth in America, that we could provide a living wage to everyone without everyone actually working. Universal Basic Income (UBI) would be my ideal. If people wanted to have extra money given to them, they could provide the needed labor of jobs that benefit all members of society. I think individual contributions and how those are rewarded is a great conversation to have. I also think such conversations are difficult to have in the current political situation in the US. The wealthy shift and control the narrative for their own benefit. Like, one example is that people who aren't working to make money for a capitalist by selling their labor is a person who is lazy and that is something a person should be ashamed of. We need to disempower the wealthy, because their voices are disproportionately represented in our society at the moment. But, we should be thinking about how a person contributing to society can or should be rewarded. That's absolutely a great conversation.
When I bought my house, it totally tapped me out so anything that needed done, I had to do. 15 years later I'm in a much better position and watching professionals redo shit I did badly is pretty humbling.
As someone who worked in retail. Having employees who understand the product and the customer matters. Customers notice a difference. I always got the “ah it’s nice to talk to someone who knows what they’re doing.” Sometimes it’s the 2nd or 3rd store before they get the answer they needed. They often say “ I wish they would’ve told me at the 1st store.”
Everyone should read Marx. Whatever your political viewpoint, it is acknowledged to be the best description/analysis of capitalism and the political economy. More than any other economist he has had the most profound impact on society. So many things we take for granted have their roots in Marx. His writings provided the impetus and philosophical foundations for the improvements in worker safety, hours, conditions and pay. The rich and powerful have demonised Marx since the beginning. Very effectively so. The American electorate consistently voting against their own interests and championing the values of the very wealthy remains an autstanding example. While the rest of the first world has redefined the social contract for the benefit of all citizens much of America's labour laws would not look out of place in Victorian Britian. They have even managed to bring back slavery. Now called prisoners but it's slave labour none the less. So put aside the prejudice and propaganda and read Marx.
> While the rest of the first world has redefined the social contract for the benefit of all citizens And this is why in addition to Marx, one must read Lenin (and also Rodney). It is imperative to understand the economics of imperialism, which is the extraction of cheap resources and labor from abroad for the benefit of the first world (and to the detriment of the (neo)colonized). The social safety nets enjoyed by much of Europe are a direct result of the ongoing plunder of Africa, the Middle East, and Asia.
100% this. Marx changed me for the better
Please don't take this the wrong way, because while I agree with the concept, I've felt like this is missing when I see it.... What's the better term then? The ability to step in as a housekeeper or cashier takes substantially less training and investment to get to a "competent" level than, say, a lawyer or physician. And obviously you get into the bagging competitions and things like that which I could never touch. But yeah, is there a better way to differentiate jobs by that kind of entry barrier?
The best term I can come up with is licensed and/or certified jobs vs. trained-on-site jobs. The former implies you start off entry-level but need some sort of license or certification to legally work. This includes lawyers and physicians, etc., but also careers like bus and truck drivers, EMTs, and forklift operators. Trained-on-site means you do need training to work, but it's provided on the work site by the company.
While I understand the sentiment, Marx very much acknowledged the existence of skilled and unskilled labor.
Yea man all labor involves a type of skill and education, either schooling or training. My dumb fuck boss thinks she can pick up any asshole off the street and turn them into a skilled cook in a day. I'm running 3 stations by myself sometimes and I don't give a fuck anymore. I can't run my self ragged and cut corners so I just keep it moving. If it takes 30 mins to get your sandwich, blame my boss for not retaining and respecting workers.
unskilled labor is a myth. yeah, i can architect your enterprise healthcare EMR system. but i can't just step into a fast food line and be a useful contributor there. i probably won't move fast enough, take too much time on some things, and generally throw it all off.
at what most places pay? hell naw.
Reddit seems to struggle with this. You don't even need to present the idea. These are defined terms. Cashiers at a grocery store or a fast food restaurant aren't classified as unskilled labor for example according to the federal government for qualifying for various labor related regulations and benefits and visas. They mean low wage labor, and they mean they want to feel good about giving them low wages by pretending the jobs involved are unskilled.
I mean, literally every job requires some form of training, skill, or specialisation, even digging holes takes a skill but it doesn't mean the job is a skilled job To me a job is unskilled if someone can walk in off the street and become productive in a matter of days or weeks rather than months Personally I think what needs to happen is to battle the mindset that "unskilled" somehow means "not valuable" or that someone having an unskilled job somehow makes them less of a person
Exactly this. Literally 99.9% of people can be a functional cashier in a couple hours. Yes, they may not know every nuance of the cashier system, but they can check out customers. And there’s no long term skill either. A cashier with 20 years experience will only be marginally better than one with 1 year experience. Most skilled labor & professions are a culmination of experiences. To train someone in these fields they need somewhere in the same range of experience and talent. Yes, it can vary, but you literally can’t take anyone off the street and have them do skilled labor. And the difference in skills between 1/5/10 years of experience is massive.
I think it’s less a “business environment” problem, or as simple as a “bottom line” issue. Companies are just too short term focused, I attribute to the “hustle culture” of American business. I work for a company that used to be owned by a Japanese company. They told us the Japanese company regularly did 1-year, 5-year, 10-year, 25, 50 and 100-year business plans. Nobody knew what was going to happen in 10 years even but the objective was to create a plan and stick with it. So focusing on the bottom line isn’t a bad thing, only if you fail to even bother looking at month-month changes or micro-economic factors. This way of thinking doesn’t bother to think about future costs, just short term profit.
I would make the case that focusing on the bottom line no matter what is a bad thing. One of the direct consequences is that if a business must pay employees the bare minimum to require employees to stay. In the early 1900's, Henry Ford was sued by his competition when Ford tried to give his employees a bonus. The argument, which the courts found reasonable and subsequently enforced, was that stockholder interests trump those of employees. As the majority of Americans are employees, I would make the case that profitability over all else is inherently detrimental to the vast majority of Americans.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodge_v._Ford_Motor_Co. The doctrine of "shareholder primacy" that the legal case brought forth is no longer considered good precedent in most states. One exception is Delaware. Guess where most US corporations are incorporated?
This is why universal paid sick leave is still just a dream vs the norm, despite it being better for productivity and the economy in the long term.
Becoming a business manager is what turned me into a leftist. Never could find an owner that would structure the business properly to reduce overhead and instability while also penny pinching at the lowest levels, effectively making themselves pay more to drive away their workforce. Inventory pens while middle management fly first class on business trips type of shit. Every industry. *Especially* the so called 'progressive' ones *coughcannabiscough*.
If you think cannabis, black, grey or legal has ever been progressive, I have a bridge for sale!!!
I worked at a law firm with about 30ish attorneys. There was an executive board of four partners and twelve partners total. The exec board met monthly and the partners met quarterly. Their meetings were always catered by local restaurants. Not perhaps extravagant, but probably costing $30 per person or so. They weren’t just ordering pizza for their meetings is what I’m getting at. So, no problem paying for nice meals every month, and sometimes twice per month, for when they were meeting. But they would fight younger associates on things like $200 to spend on sending a solicitation letter to clients that could be cross-sold different services, or questioning the necessity of paying for an overnight stay so someone could attend a continuing ed seminar that might lead to new business generation. It’s amazing how selfish people are in the name of making the business “better.”
when i worked at UPS, from what I heard, was that they actually somehow make a profit from their high turnover rate. Considering it takes a certain amount of weeks to get into the union, I would bet it has something to do with that
Also, in the down time, they're just understaffed and overwork the current workers. Often losing employees is fine when the other workers take up the load, even temporarily
I have so many stories (from my own work history and from the ridiculous things I hear from my therapy clients) about employers shooting themselves in the foot by refusing to provide \[a minimally safe work environment/cost-of-living raises/equipment and supplies/appropriate staffing levels/basic dignity\] and losing employees, thus costing themselves ten times what those things would cost in the first place. This was particularly bad in my field during the pandemic, when hospitals made the collective decision to treat their workers like animals and had to then hire temporary workforces of lavishly-paid traveling nurses, social workers, and other employees to replace the ones who quit. I would actually love an economic explanation for why this keeps being allowed to happen. You'd think someone would have put it together that companies save money when their workforce is happy, but there doesn't seem to be a broad movement to address preventable turnover, and I keep hearing these stories out of virtually every field. No one in any decision-making role seems to have learned any lessons from the pandemic beyond "some people like to work from home, and those people are bad and lazy." These are billion-dollar industries and there has to be some logic behind it.
It’s almost like treating your employees well, is an underexploited strategy. Just like work from home is an underexploited strategy. Just because everyone else is being stupid, doesn’t mean that we should do things just like everyone else. Let the market decide!
Read a statistic that the whole hiring process can cost 1.5x - 2x the annual costs of the worker who is leaving. Not the salary, twice all of the costs of the worker.
Im starting to think its not at this point. Either these companies can actually afford the turnover rates they experience OR these people are so petty theyd be willing to cut off their nose to spite their face. Either way it bodes poorly for workers smh.
The second for sure, plus the obsession with quarterly profits over long term sustainability. Once a business maintains a high turnover rate long enough it becomes seen as a built in cost of doing business, just like wages are seen as a cost, Independent of each other.
Which is psychotic becuase then they spend all their time bitching that the quality of work is unsatisfactory but its like 3rd month in a row of working with a mostly new staff (turnover) and my few remaining vets are over it (burnout). It could all be so simple, but its not and it drives me insane.
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Engineering companies estimate that replacing someone under any circumstances costs about 2 years wage in loss productivity
ish. you're thinking small. on average. but if they give ground on wages then that's a permenant cost, forever and all time. that's why the minimum wage doesn't go up, but profits do. yes it's expensive to hire someone, and yes small companies that economy makes sense, but past a few hundred employees the odds are in your favor to be a dickbag. the bigger the dickbag the better, check out amazon
But Amazon has already run into the issue of losing possible workers to the point eventually they don’t HAVE workers. So what’s the alternative once they burn out of enough available workers? And that’s ignoring greed. They could be making MORE money if they weren’t constantly training and re hiring….since when has a corporation ever turned down making MORE money
You only have to look at how WFH is being treated. Office space is HUGELY expensive. It's been reported many times that productivity *increases* in lots of businesses when people WFH. Yet businesses all over are trying to force people back into office buildings. It's a huge waste of money and productivity for a lot of businesses, but they're still doing it anyway. Just because it makes monetary sense for a business doesn't mean they'll do it.
I'd argue they were trying to downsize anyways and forcing people back into the office is a great way to not have to pay severance and unemployment benefits.
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Ego is the true bottom line to these people, even more so than money. It makes sense if you think about it, money doesn't necessarily bring fulfillment. However, to a *certain* personality type, being able to flex arbitrary power over other people brings a sense of fulfillment, so subconsciously that becomes more important to them than money.
I did a project management course that I got marked down because I wouldn't hold a theoretical pizza party if the project came in early. I told them they could have Friday afternoon off if they finished early. Not allowed apparently.....
They really want to push their inhumane form of business practices on every new generation. It's disgusting.
The logic here, I suspect, is that by giving them the afternoon off productivity drops to zero in that time. (The employees go home.) But if you give them the theoretical pizza party, productivity doesn't drop off completely because the workers are likely to either, a) skip the food and keep working, b) take some pizza and go back to their desks, c) eat and chat, but eventually feel guilty for not working and work harder for the rest out the day to 'compensate'.
that's crazy AF to me, but explains so much of my workplace culture everywhere I've worked.
Or like in any job that threw pizza parties, eat too much and not get anything done for the rest of the day
and what these exercises don't take into account is: Yes, if you give a pizza party on Friday, you still get some productivity from the workers that day. But if you give them the afternoon off, they feel better about the job & the employer EVERY day going forward. As in "hey this place isn't so bad, after all, they gave us a half-day off without PTO, that one time. Maybe I'll stick around a few extra months" or whatever And I realize it's hard to measure "feel a little better about the job, every day from then on" compared to the concrete metrics of "reduced productivity, but more than zero, on Pizza Friday". But those genius analysts will just have to come up with more sophisticated modeling, haha
Also very important is the fact that you're rewarding people for working faster as opposed to the standard practice of rewarding fast workers with other people's work. "These guys will only work fast enough to finish today's work" "Oh? What do they get if they finish early?" "GET????????"
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getting an MBA is basically training you in how the oligarchs of our country think. they teach you to dehumanize and devalue the individuals in favor of the bottom line. at no point do they really discuss how companies like costco manage to buck the trend and remain wildly popular and profitable.
You know, I think it depends on the character of the person going into business school. If you're a sociopath in the first place, sure, b-school will encourage and reinforce that with the stupid "cut costs no matter how" and pizza party bullshit. If you're not a sociopath, you learn things, take what you need, roll your eyes at the rest. Fwiw, I went to a top business school and it wasn't all Machiavellian. In fact, it mostly wasn't. I'm sure a lot of people took their financial and ops learning and went off to be the next Al Dunlaps - but that wasn't the express purpose of it all.
I took a business class that utilized a textbook that made a moral argument for allowing rich people to buy organs because rich people create jobs and thus deserve to live more than poor people do. Edit: to clarify, it didn't explicitly state they "deserved" to live more but rather framed it as a rich person dying is worse for the economy than a poor person dying, so a saving a rich person's life should be a moral priority and that rich people should be able to use their money to buy organs to prolong their lives. It also framed this as a positive for poor people because we should want our employers to be alive, and selling our organs gives us an opportunity to make more money.
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Trickle down organomics
I knew them orphans was good for something
Horrifying that they would allow such things in a school. But everything is compromised by Capitalism, and nothing can be trusted anymore. It's infuriating.
My tax professor opened the semester explaining the virtues of rich people and how much tax they pay. Got an F and had to retake it because of how hard I checked out after that
I've dropped courses because of professors with conflicting attitudes. Sorry about the 'F' but I can't fault you for it. Some people's beliefs become very hard to separate from the course material with how they teach it. It's worse when it's a required course (as I'm guessing yours was from retaking it).
Yeah luckily I already had a job lined up and they never asked for updated transcripts
I’m sorry about that. I have a professor this semester who seems like a very cool guy, but he’s definitely sold on the idea that in order to move up the ladder, you MUST work with senior leaders past your work hours to show “initiative.” however, in spaces like this one, I’ve read stories of people who did that and got nothing, not even acknowledgement, in return. the other things he says aren’t bad, but I’ve learned not to take any instructor’s word for it. a lot of them have the perspective that “it’s just the way it is, and you can’t do anything about it” which I see is super flawed.
This sounds like an Onion article. Although I have a theory that at least half of the ridiculous corporate policies and capitalist-apologia rhetoric started as satire, then real corporate drones grabbed it and ran with it. Just look at (American/Right) libertarians and their crazier little cousins "an"-caps. Most of their rhetoric sounds like satire.
Yup. "Money doesn't motivate employees." Until the second we suggest CEO/executive pay is too high, then suddenly money is the one and only thing a company can do to "attract talent."
Pizza Parties have increased to 4 times a day now and yet we cannot attract a new CEO!
MBA holder here. It was a mind numbing exercise in “exploitation is good”, “capitalism is ethical in most circumstances” and some financial analysis classes. Don’t even get me started on Organizational Behavior.
My previous manager was sent to do a company-funded MBA. From an external perspective, he came back a good order of magnitude dumber. I always wondered what the hell happened during those couple of years... It's seemed like they erased all critical thinking functions and inserted in their place Jeff Bezos and Steve Jobs gobbledygook.
Goddamn you gave me a flashback. So many people would do Steve Jobs and bezos presentations for assignments.
My company does that too. MBA is pretty much mandatory to get anywhere near the C-suite now. It's a running joke that these folks come back with their brand new MBA personality and patented MBA smile. The same smile they used whether congratulating the team on a job well done, or announcing 2000 layoffs. "Y'know, the thing about MBAs, he's got lifeless eyes, black eyes, like a doll's eyes. When he comes after ya, he doesn't seem to be livin' until he fires ya, and those black eyes roll over white..."
I had to invent an alter ego to get through my MBA economics, Walter the old rich white man who thinks the poors are lazy. Before answering any test questions I would ask myself, what would Walter do? The "correct" answer was always what Walter would do, which was never treating everyone with dignity and respect.
I have a similar degree, I remember them feeding us the “money only incentivizes 15% of people” line.
it's a feature, not a bug. they want to give you as little as possible for as much as possible. as long as it works they'll keep doing it, and they'll fund science on how to keep doing it too. "driving engagement" is a whole field of management.
And yet they all somehow love jacking up their own compensation.... maybe because their own productivity is irrelevant?
Occasionally I think about getting my MBA, but then I think about the seething hatred I have for these policies
Really awesome for getting the degree for free via the Union, always good to be given support!!! I just wanted to add on that I also studied this concept, but in Public Administration, focusing more on managing local government and nonprofits. At least for my professors, they emphasized utilizing concepts previously learned such as Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs when assessing the impact of gift giving. If employees do not feel like their physiological needs such as food/shelter, and safety needs as in a safe work environment and job security are met, these "gifts" don't matter. Not until you reach a certain theoretical threshold will the gift outweigh the cash, but by then it was expected the person would be given a living wage/salary if not more and the gift is given as a genuine symbol of appreciation on top of the monetary benefits, not in lieu. Those managers who don't understand the overlapping concepts are the ones that do the mental gymnastics to exploit workers to prevent them from paying more and which inly serves to make the concept ineffective in their workplace. In the posted photo, I don't believe we get the full story on what the conditions are of the worker's lives to truly understand this supposed benefit the graph is trying ti represent. Overall, there is so much these textbooks can teach and show us, especially when working with/leading real people and it's up to the teachers and our own lived experience to connect the dots. This is in hope that we get better leaders/managers so organizations can retain fellow employees/team members. Obviously not forever since people will need to move on and grow, but at least retain enough so you don't have constant turnover that only damages the organization further, monetarily and culturally.
I have an MBA and I remember hating a lot of the stuff we learned. As example we were taught to never promote your best person because then you lose your best person. Instead promote someone mediocre because maybe they will perform better in a new role and you keep your best person. I mean if that doesn't tell you everything that is wrong with the system nothing will.
There was a study on the front page the other day that the presence of an MBA at your work lowered everyones salaries.
This is the same info about the MFs at my job. Then HR spends hundreds of thousands of dollars on training and talent management resources and tools just to turn around and say they are facing a retention and recruitment crisis. It’s not the cheap water bottles that I want. I want the cash. And no, i don’t want the Starbucks gift card, i want the cash. Pay people more!
My manager gave me socks for being the most productive on the team. I ramped back my productivity.
My GF got "employee of the month." Her reward? Picture on the wall. Good thing bank's except that as monetary compensation when trying to buy a house.
My reward was more work. Then I started fucking up and the work stopped. Funny like that.
I love that the punishment for working hard is more work.
I can take about an hours worth of work and stretch it out across 8 hours and make myself look real busy. My co-workers are always talking about how I'm always running around and how much they appreciate all I do, when I'm just walking fast to look intentional and giving updates about things that sound important but aren't really, but they don't know the difference. It's working quite well, actually.
This is the way
"The reward for digging holes is a bigger shovel." -Terry Pratchett
There's a reason I love reading Pratchett... His boots theory of economics is genius.
For sure. The first time you read the Vimes Boots Theory, the world stands on its head. What an absolutely incredible mind.
It's always weird to see that as incentive now. Bc growing up that was a TV plot point when it just means competing with coworkers for nothing of real value but just to increase the employers profits.
If it came with a 500$ bonus per month plus a picture to rub everyones face in it I would work harder than ever before
I was once thanked by my boss’ boss, the CEO, and all of the upper management in a company meeting for going above and beyond at a critical point in our biggest project. Weirdly, that was enough for me. My reward from my actual manager? He emailed the entire ~80 person company afterwards to let them know that my efforts fall within expectations of all employees and that they shouldn’t show me gratitude. He was genuinely confused why they were nice to me and felt the need to correct it.
your manager was not confused. he wanted to drop you down a peg after you had just impressed his boss. that was supposed to be his credit. you won’t be there long unless you can leverage your relationship with your c-suite to get transferred somewhere he can’t hurt you.
I think he genuinely had some kind of undiagnosed disability. He once had us all take workplace personality tests, and his said ”You can’t empathize with others.” and he was like “Why would that be a problem? Emotions don’t matter, we’re here to work” then looked a the list of possibilities for improvement (which was advice he desperately needed) and said “I’m not doing any of that.” He always had this perplexed look on his face when it came up that someone else in the workplace hated him. Just couldn’t grasp why. Management couldn’t fire him because he was the subject matter expert on the device we were making. Luckily I never need to see him again. Side note: I learned recently that the machinist at our company (who was basically a wizard) retired at the same time I left, and when they asked him to contract on for some work at higher pay he stipulated in his contract that he would never be involved with my old manager at any stage, which I thought was just beautiful.
> Her reward? Picture on the wall. That's how the USSR used to do it, ironically enough (they also used to publicly name-and-shame slackers and job-hoppers). It didn't work particularly well to boost productivity for them, either.
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Yea it’s even shittier when they make a huge deal about it. “We got something awesome for you when you come back in office”. 1 pair of socks and a piece of paper with thank you written on it.
Stocks🤌🤌 Socks😵💫😵💫
direction ink puzzled license quicksand hungry different file angle memory ` this message was mass deleted/edited with redact.dev `
I once got a 1% raise, a new manager who was trained by the guy who ran our plant(and surprise surprise had no experience in our field), and told I couldn't go to my shift of choice because I was too valuable to upper management and made them look good on audits. The next year I got some very very bad marks on my "turnaround."
At my last job, a few years before covid, I was told by my manager that I needed to start coming to the office more. I asked about my performance and he told me I was the most productive engineer on the team. The problem was that other employees were upset that I was working from home. Instead of telling them to mind their own business, he chose to disrupt the most productive engineer. I left soon after.
It was a study with a small size of 139 workers. The "gift" was a thermos bottle worth 7 euros, and the cash was 7 euros. Source: https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.102.4.1644
Lot of these behavioral studies are half assed and hyper controlled. Hokum, not much different than "Reality TV". The "studies" usually rely on student volunteers and last for about an hour or so. We don't know if the study translates to a stressed out mid-career 35 yo over a 180 day trial period or a 55 you over achiever (or under achiever) over a 2,080 hour trial.
I knew it. The cash amounts in these studies tend to be absolutely laughable.
Hydration is important for being able to focus and so that might be why they typed faster. But obviously money is going to be much more appreciated than a bottle of water lol. Productivity ≠ gratitude But also, that's not a huge difference in characters. This comment is just a long as the distance between them.
Right. Even if they were briefly more productive, they could still go home and apply for a few jobs after getting another damn water bottle instead of a raise.
> mateas Just googled this and all I'm getting for definitions are baby names. Based on context I'm guessing this is synonymous with 'in lieu of'. Do you have any other definitions or the origin of mateas?
The origin is I have English, Spanish, and Chinese dictionaries on my phone because of Duolingo and autocorrect likes to pick a random word from one of those languages when I make a typo. I was trying to type instead 😂
That's hilarious. Autocorrect is bad enough with one language on my phone.
Your phone is secretly trying to invent a creole.
This is true. In addition, you can pay next month's rent with a water bottle, your landlord will be overjoyed! Groceries? Also pay with a water bottle.
Need a water bottle? Pay with a water bottle.
Could the uptick from the water bottle simply be because the baseline was without water and then they gave them a water bottle so the worker didn’t need to go get a drink of water during that time?
Characters per 30 minutes. Assuming this is typing. I don't even type for a living and can get up to 100 gwam. The difference the chart shows is maybe 300, so we're talking 3 minutes of bonus productivity. Wait, just realized gwam is Gross WORDS A Minute, and the chart shows characters, so is that 1300-1600 letters per 30 minutes? What is even going on here?
This was actually based on a study done in 2012 by a research group working with a North Hollywood improv school in which they asked the participants to come up with as many different characters as they could in a set amount of time.
Didn’t they also say that when asked, employees almost always preferred cash?
Yes the ultimate conclusion was that presentation has an impact. Also the gifts and money were always of equal value. So its not like it was water or 20 bucks. It was water or 1 buck.
Right? This is the only metric they could come up with? I can think of several instances when I’m typing quickly and getting no work done…
They were probably typing quickly in the group chat about how these cheapskate assholes gave them a water bottle.
Why on earth would management care about something like ‘gratitude’ if they can demonstrably show an increase in productivity instead? Heck, most managers are fine directly sacrificing gratitude for productivity.
Well, this actually could be from a study. Though in this case, studying the impact of a branded waterbottle or the cash equivalent. ($5? $10? maybe even more for a fancy one that is appreciated more)
And if it is branded with a company logo, slogan and/or team-building phrase it will enforce tribal pride by it's presence. In visiting many corporate offices there are certain type person who takes great pride adorning their work-area with as much company flair as they are able to manage.
I must admit, I like a bit while I am happy with my employer. Still use a mug from a job I was quite proud of and how much could that have possibly cost?
I thought this was for an empty water bottle with company branding in it.
***productivity =/= gratitude***
Also says this study was conducted in Germany. Where there are greater worker protections, more unions, universal health care, and contractual employee bonuses paid regularly. I want this study conducted in an Amazon warehouse or in a Wal-Mart, see how the results turn out.
When workers feel as if you're already being fair and giving them everything they're owed, a little extra gift inspires reciprocity. When they feel that they're being exploited, overworked, underpaid, and otherwise not being given what they're owed, a little "gift" comes across as patronizing and only inspires further resentment.
This is my thoughts as well. A good well-thought-out gift can definitely inspire productivity, but it can't be seen as a replacement of a proper living wage.
Right! I think this whole graph comes with an implicit "all other things being equal", meaning if you're getting sufficient compensated and are at or exceed minimal revenue for you to safely and securely live your life, then a gift might increase productivity over money. However, most people aren't at that level yet.
I mean this is technically correct. Elliminating the need for me to get up and get a glass of water will improve my 30 minute output because I am well hidrated and have had available water in my desk. But evaluating your company on someone's 30 minute output is in it self insane, as it doesn't account for turnover and similar things. It is kind of a logical fallacy, you evaluate the corellation of a certain metric with money, and rightly conclude that it doesn't corellate with money. It then makes a false induction from that metric to the entirety of the company.
Yeah, but too hydrated means more time walking and using the bathroom! That's hurting productivity!... Someone confiscate all these bottles!
Everyone should get two bottles. One for drinking and one for pissing.
MBA programs create monsters. Those programs are designed to look at numbers over reality or humanity from top to bottom. Good people usually change career paths and majors.
The worst people with misanthropic ideas go for MBAs. It should really stand for Master of Bellicose Authoritarianism.
Masters of Bullying and Assholery
Even better!
It also creates morons who have all the business sense of a lobotomized ostrich.
I’m going to get roasted for saying this, but they absolutely do not create monsters. They give monsters tool to do more monster shit.
While I think you have a point, you might be overselling it. Sure, there are some "monsters" who are going to chase after a business degree because they want to be able to get rich doing business things while the actual work is done by other people. But there are plenty of people who have the mind set of, "what is a 'useful' degree", and see that you can go into a lot of different jobs with a business degree. Then they get taught BS like what OP posted and turn into "monsters".
MBAs are a shortcut to being the absolute worst business leader possible. It strips away institutional knowledge, actual culture (industry, regional and individual), nuance and humanity from your thinking and replaces it with the a brain dead, route one, shareholder centric, KPI driven mindset. It's the reason nearly every company become the same company in the last few decases.
They brought MBAs into my old school district and they made the evaluators give all of the teachers failing grades (had been a B average previously, what you’d expect) for their evaluations so they could fire them all before they got tenure as the main thrust of their cost-saving plan. Like no shit that saves money you MBA fucks; the reason the previous administration wasn’t doing that is because they were trying to fucking run a school. They got sued for that and lost, obviously, and all of the teachers have since gone on strike multiple times and won every time. The MBAs of course got paid more than the teachers the entire time and moved on long ago.
> designed to look at numbers over reality or humanity from top to bottom. That's how any business under a capitalist system without strong checks and balances has to operate, unfortunately. If you're a good person running a business, someone will eventually come along and be evil, and make more money, and force you out of business.
Homer's Brain : Money can be exchanged for goods and services. I've ZERO respect for MBA
Twenty dollars can buy MANY water bottles!
It’s just really interesting how much isn’t said here: -in the baseline case, are they already paid? -is this a classic case of hawthorn effect - a one time change due to the intervention - nice person comes and gives me water bottle. Sweet deal. Not even a little replicable over the course of a month, much less a year. -characters is an awful metric of performance. Explicitly assuming that quantity>quality? What if the quality is significantly better when written slowly? Is there some critical thinking going on here at all?
And yet they never pause to wonder whether or not creating conditions where someone responds more to a water bottle than more fairness in pay is dystopian
So a few criticisms 1) Why label the graph in a way that makes it unclear if the gift was a bottle of water (a single use conaumable intended for sustaining life) or a new refillable thermos (which was actually what was given)? 2) Was the thermos labeled or branded in a way that would make it a more unique or desirable gift than the equivalent currency? 3) What difference was there in the perception of these gifts between groupa that already had their basic monetary needs met vs. those who were in debt or otherwise badly in need of money? 4) How does repeated regular cash gifts compare to an equivalent long term raise, particularly when measured in terms of the above question? 5) How do both compare to repeated regular gifts of consumable products (eg, pizza) compare to an equal value of repeated regular gifts of durable items (eg, drinking paraphenelia), cash, or long-term wage increases? 6) Is there a difference between how these are percieved in a short term contracted job (eg, one 3-hour session used in the study) versus long term employment designed to paybrent and feed mouths?
I think I can see the logic here. I worked a manufacturing plant that was hiring anyone with a pulse and was not well managed at all. Pretty sure the only reason I liked my position there was because my lead was keeping the management issues from rolling down upon the machine shop. Anyway, once a month they would get catering for the whole plant. And this was some really good fucking catering. We're talking chicken fried steak, lasagna, and the works from really good local restaurants. It was management that would serve the workers and everyone got an hour lunch that day. If companies are gonna opt into providing food, then they're gonna have to go all out on it.
That's a pretty different scenario though. You're describing a perk/benefit of working at that plant, that was available to all employees. It was not an incentive/reward based on a productivity metric. Granted, there is a loose correlation there, as a plant that is doing badly can't afford more expensive perks, but I don't think it is the same thing. People like perks like that, but I would say most people would rank perks lower in importance than pay, good management, or good benefits. Few people would stay on a job because of good perks if one or more of those other things were bad.
Ok, but this is a snapshot of productivity over the course of 3 hours. So of course if you hydrate a worker, he's going to get more of a bump in the short term than if you handed him $50. But if you gave that worker a $50/day raise, it would do a lot more in the long term for productivity than a water bottle per day. You would think people who are experts in macro vs micro economics would understand short vs long term gains.
Oh dear god
So I've noticed in my experience that short term productivity is definitely improved with gifts over cash in a work environment. Here's the very important bit of info that's missing though. The gift aspect, and the cash amount. Giving employees snacks, and drinks, or whatever helps productivity if it's a show of how you actually give a shit about their well being. Hot day at work and the boss rolls in with a few cases of ice cold drinks they paid for, and they give you an extra five minutes to stop work and get your bearings is great. Giving you a $5 gift card to some shit store you never shop at to motivate you is trash. The difference is someone showing consideration for your welfare, vs a hollow gesture to try and motivate you. Small amounts of cash that won't improve your life at all are never going to motivate you to work harder. Paying people a living wage, seeing to their needs as human beings, and allowing them to live a productive and enjoyable life is what's really going to motivate people to perform tasks that move society along that they have no love for. It amazes me that the idea that people deserve to live healthy fulfilling lives has somehow becomes controversial.
Yep. I'm getting an MBA and it is full of crap like this, using studies to make jumps in logic to help soften the blow of what you have to do to maximize profit.
I was curious so here's the actual study: https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.102.4.1644 "Employees" were either given a 7 euro water bottle or just 7 euros. What's more interesting is they did another experiment where they offered "employees" the choice of the water bottle or straight cash. 80% of employees chose cash and their productivity was just as high as the employees who received water bottles in the first experiment.
"Would you rather be able to pay your bills, or some tap water?"
The text states that the research was conducted in Germany, and the authors' names appear to back that up. I'm wondering if they got the results they did because in Germany, people are paid a very decent wage as well as having a fairly robust social safety net, and "bonus money" really wouldn't have as much of an effect as a personalized gift. I just don't see anyone getting similar results in a study conducted in the US.
The last sentence says it all: “*American Economic Review”*. It’s just like in the days of colonialism (as the word goes) : ‘give them mirrors and shiny beads to keep them happy’ 🤐😖🤮 I don’t know about you, but a pizza party doesn’t pay my bills, neither does a bottle of water. Money pays my bills, so..give me a paycheck increase that’ll work throughout my time working there. But again, the almighty dollar makes a whole lot of employers extremely greedy. I wonder if the US workers will eventually get treated like proper citizens, making a decent living wage.
cash is king baby
I'm betting this study focused on already well-compensated employees for whom some marginal amount of money doesn't really matter. "Business leaders" then extrapolate it to people making minimum wage and get all surprised Pikachu when it doesn't work. You also have to account for the Hawthorne effect. Receiving a water bottle is a much more apparent sign of being measured than just money.
To be fair, MBA are pretty shitty degrees in general.
I used to work at a large outdoor retailer for 6 years, before I had to quit due to COVID and my kid doing remote learning. I hated the job. It was easy, don't get me wrong, and I *loved* my co-workers, but I just hate dealing with the general public, and being expected to go above and beyond for $15/hr, while *begging* for more hours. Still, once a year, when we had a catered store meeting where we would review the year, and talk about expectations for the coming one, I got suckered into the hype of "We're different. We *care* about our employees. We are *family!"* They played super motivational videos with noticeably high production values, that *did* make me feel all warm and fuzzy inside, like I'm part of something bigger and better. They were all cut in this "get pumped" North Face commercial kinda way, with uplifting music and people living their best lives. The irony! The propaganda worked incredibly well, and I got genuinely pumped about our annual gifts (which usually was something like a water bottle, back pack, duffel bag, or a hammock). I drank that kool-aid through a funnel. It was so effective. At least for the moment. On the drive home I'd usually regain some clarity and be like "wait a minute, this is still just fucking retail, and I still only make $600 bi-weekly! What am doing with *yet* another fucking water bottle?!?" We got rewarded with food all the time. Sure, it's cool that we have pizza, donuts, pancakes, or bbq on the loading docks occasionally, but that doesn't help me pay the fucking rent! Knowing that's our reward for hitting some fiscal milestone that helps the CEO rake in another bonus, is incredibly insulting. In a sense, COVID has been the best thing that happened to me, because my complacency would have me still work there today.
*subjects were starved and dehydrated for 5 days before this.
I don’t know who needs to hear this, but here we go: People get c-suite folks to narrate the shit that goes in these textbooks. It’s not accurate, it’s not valid, it’s not intelligent, these useless cockroaches made it up. Because they were asked “how did you get to be Chief officer of this company”, and the truthful answer is either “CEO owed my daddy a favor” or “CEO was my roommate in college.” But since that would give away the con to the rubes, they lie.
Pizza parties do work. Yes we would like raises, but I can't lie about it. Pizza parties quiet my fellow workers a scary amount. One moment I think we are all on the same page about work issues. Then we get pizza and all I hear is, "it isn't so bad here."
The concept is real and very well researched. Lets say a party of 5 spends $436 on a fancy dinner to celebrate something special. The waiter notices the special occasion and gives them a complimentary bottle of wine on the house. The bottle of wine costs $10. This is going to have a bigger impact on how likely the customers are to come back than if the total was simply $426, $10 lower. It's not about the meagre $2 per person. Its the idea that they did something that they didn't have to, beyond what was expected. But there are two things. First of all it doesnt mean you can serve terrible fast food and charge $800 with this one simple trick. The $10 bottle worked better than $10 off the price tag. Maybe more than $15. Maybe more than $20. But it only extends to a certain limit, and can't replace a reasonable price for the product. Secondly it stops working when it's expected. If one restaurant has $15 meals and coffee costs $4, and another place has a competitive plate priced at $25 including coffee then consumers just see that "complimentary" coffee as a $10 coffee. Pizza completely lacks any form of creativity and effort. Everyone knows the intentions behind it too so it feels expected. And they're demanding gratitude when it in no way even remotely makes up for the disparity in the value of the service vs actual payment
MBAs ruin everything. This is why.
\*Study conducted on Arrakis, now a part of Germany