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.
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.