'I'd come in three or four hours late': New corporate management instates overreaching attendance policy, worker takes advantage and comes in late

Punishment: A negative stimulus administered in response to you doing something that you shouldn't have done in order to discourage you from doing it again. The hope here is that this would be severe enough to prevent further instances of the behavior.

While that's all well and good, the punishment needs to fit the crime… if it's not severe enough, the behavior will probably just continue, especially when the person you're trying to incentivize isn't particularly incentivize-able—probably because they're lacking proper motivation for one reason or another.

On the flip side, if the punishment is too severe—or you take things too far—you might find that it doesn't have the intended result, instead prompting the punished paradoxically further into their undesired behavioral pattern. Similarly, if the punishment for a minor infringement is the same as a major one, you might find that offenders of the minor turn to doing the major because they're going to be punished the same regardless, so they might as well just go all the way.

For instance, if you implement a new policy at your corporate office punishing workers for being late, it doesn't really make sense to give workers the same punishment for arriving mere moments after their scheduled starting time as you would for being hours late. Unless you're one of the many brazenly incompetent managers that are out there, it should be obvious that these two infringements are really very different things. The first entails that you intended to be on time and got caught at one traffic light too many on your way to work, while the second probably happened because you just couldn't be bothered to be there on time.

Yet, this isn't the first time that a blanket policy was applied with broad strokes of a much-too-large brush, and it won't be the last either.

See this worker's account of events that occurred at their workplace when a new corporate policy pushed them to the ends of their sanity, resulting in some serious malicious compliance.

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Posted by Brad Dickson