Re:When your coworker does great work, tell their manager
by zozbot234 on Thursday July 16, 2020 @12:45PM
(#23860777)
> It became office politics and groups of mutual admiration clubs
Right, the incentive problem is especially hard here, because "compliments" and "praise" by definition involve unverified info, so it's really easy for the whole thing to devolve into a popularity contest, and you can only avoid this by discouraging it. OTOH it might still be possible to reward employees for praise of coworkers that involves some amount of verifiability. It's not that everything is going to be verified after-the-fact, but the possibility has to be real so that everyone's behavior is kept in line.
But once you ask folks to do it and there's any positive outcome ... it becomes a thing.
I've been a part of similar systems and as soon as it is sort of institutionalized, it is a nightmare.
It became office politics and groups of mutual admiration clubs, and frankly a lot of folks who maybe needed to up their game in the view of their bosses got in on these sort of mutual admiration clubs. More so than those who didn't, and that really skewed things.
The underlying fact is a complement from a coworker might have jack squat to do with ... actually doing anything good, it could even be because of a bad thing, who knows, you just never know.
As soon as it isn't 'organic' it becomes kinda horrible.