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Comment by AceyMan | Hacker News Reader

I worked for the airlines (first career) and for public-facing employees it was a big deal if you got a 'good letter' from a customer. (It was equally suck if you happened to get a bad one...).

We also could file 'thank you / attaboy' paperwork for our colleagues, both in our own department or ones we interacted with. Those were just as valuable (if not more) than ones from the customers.

Over the years (11) during my employment there I received a couple of good letters, and they were recognized by the management in a very sincere way.

To this day of & when I have an extraordinary collaboration with someone in the corporation I'll take the time to write a thank you letter to their manager.

It's just a great practice that harkens back to the old adage, "there's nothing better than a nice handwritten thank you card." Since I'm in management, it serves as a nice means to to move the needle for a colleague in the eyes of the company.

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Ages ago when I did basic PC support we had a "attaboy" system.

The thing about it was nobody liked it because attaboys were random. They had nothing to do with doing a good job or anything, they showed up randomly.

Most of the time "attaboys" showed up for doing the absolute most basic thing that is part of the job. You do it every day... but randomly an "attaboy" shows up, because by the roll of the dice you helped a nice person, that's it.

In the meantime if you went the extra mile for someone, never would any sort of attaboy would show up. In fact you might even get complaints from those folks.

For the support team watching some manager trot out an "attaboy" for no apparent reason as if it was a merit type thing was kinda demoralizing.

It can be extremely demoralising for co-workers in all kinds of roles when they see that kind of recognition being given to someone who they feel don't deserve it.

Personally I think it's risky to acknowledge these kind of things in front of a team for that reason unless it's better quantified. I've personally as well been in situations where

I've been outright resentful because the recognition of someone I knew was doing a bad job made it clear we could not expect recognition based on merits, and so what was the point of putting in the effort?

A while back I thought I had read something that indicated that merit based recognition was often a point of contention.

But random rewards, that were acknowledged to be random actually raised morale across the board, even among those who didn't get it.

The 'reasons' and so forth are often a big deal to people.

That wouldn't surprise me. A a merit based reward that feels like it wasn't justified and given for "political reasons" or what have you gives those who feel overlooked every reason to assume they don't stand a chance at all, and a reason to be angry. It's hard to be get angry or annoyed at random chance.

> It can be extremely demoralising for co-workers in all kinds of roles when they see that kind of recognition being given to someone who they feel don't deserve it.

This is why wages are secret. Everyone is convinced they deserve to be in the top half of earners.

In Norway all wages are viewable on a public website https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-40669239 It's pretty interesting.

Well, sort of. Taxable income is, but since Norway allows e.g debt interest payments for mortgages etc. to be offset against mortgage, taxable income can vary quite a bit even for people with the same exact income.

Businesses want wages to be secret and may even adopt policies that ban employees from discussing it, but in the U.S. employees' rights to discuss pay amongst themselves are protected under the NLRA.

https://www.insperity.com/blog/when-employees-discuss-wages/

Source? or is this a personal theory?

Personal theory!

I hope you landed on it independently via gut without thinking it through much, because this is one of the boilerplate reasons companies use to trick people into thinking that they'd be better off not knowing everyone's salaries, when in reality companies just want to keep it secret to have more power over salary negotiation.

Wages are tried to be kept secret by a company because a company wants to pay its employees as little as they can get away with.

I saw a flight attendant being yelled at by a horrid passenger and knew that she might get a “bad letter” from them so I sent in a good letter for her about how she handled the abuse with aplomb. Glad to hear it was worth the effort

This works for airlines because compliments for employees are unsolicited and customers mostly have to go out of their way to give them. As a result, if one is given you can be pretty sure it's both genuine and meaningful. As soon as you apply a metric to feedback, though, the effectiveness goes out the window. For example, I spent some time in the automotive customer experience world and car dealers routinely abuse the hell out of feedback systems by pressuring customers into providing positive scores and comments.

Similar things happen when you try to use feedback systems like this as a component of internal review processes - they tend to get gamed extremely quickly.

I'm so glad to hear this! While it's common to give feedback on bad experiences, I've always felt it's important to give feedback when things go really well. Especially if someone has fixed a really difficult situation or made it manageable - I will always send feedback to the company about that individual and thank them for their help. I've been surprised about the lack of feedback sometimes though, whereas a negative response will always get feedback from the company.

Delta (at least) gives their elite members "Job Well Done" certificates every year they qualify for this reason - in a service oriented company, having a default currency for recognizing people going above and beyond is a great tool.

I'm not sure what benefit one of the certificates (they have serial numbers!) actually confers, but I imagine it's more about the emotional uplift than it is monetary value.

I've long wanted a way to bring this to more workplaces. In previous companies, we had shout-outs at our company all-hands, which were low-effort to write and a fantastic way to recognize a coworker. It didn't involve any $$ compensation, which made it all the more meaningful to me.

[errata] "since I'm not in management..." That goof did not change anything about my retold experience but I couldn't let that sit there and be so wrong <bulging_eyes>.

I wonder if any unscrupulous people wrote in a bunch of fake customer "good letters" to get promoted

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