Laurel van der Toorn

Well, maybe it's not that extreme, but tiny workplace slights can crush morale and productivity.

Details up next.

A late birthday card at work.

It sounds harmless, right?

Well, new research says it can tank your morale.

It can spike absenteeism and it can kill productivity because sometimes the smallest workplace slights can hit you the hardest.

We're going to talk about workplace slights and the impact they might have on you with professor of management at the University of Pennsylvania, Peter Capelli, who's done research in this area.

Peter, welcome to the show.

Thank you.

I love that you studied workplace slights.

I just have to ask, what got you so motivated to research these?

You know, research in these kind of topics, business management, it's not like we're studying cancer, you know, where there's a clear program.

We know what the goal is, cure cancer.

We're just at least maybe me pick particularly because of attention issues, you know.

something appears to be interesting, poof, there you go.

So we were studying, generally looking at employee performance in the context of organizations, and we stumbled upon this place that had collected, for reasons that had nothing to do with us,

data on this that is they could actually see when birthday cards were handed out to people it was collected by the center of the corporation and they had a rule basically the supervisors are supposed to give it to you and they were serious about that the idea of handing it to the person and saying happy birthday was part of the whole deal it wasn't sticking it in their pigeonhole you know

And it just so happened that they also collected when the cards were actually delivered.

And then you could see what happened afterwards.

And poof, that's what we found.