Laurel van der Toorn

Am I more likely to not be very productive and check Facebook while I'm at my desk?

What is the effect of these slights at work?

Yeah, so the only thing we could really measure, this is retail context, so you can't, it's not like they're selling stuff or things like that.

We have lots of different performance measures.

But you could look at their absenteeism, and you could also look at, because they had some control over how many hours they worked, did they pull it back?

And the answer was absenteeism jumped up a lot.

The number was 50%, which sounds unbelievable, somebody told me, but...

You know, if baseline absenteeism is one day and you move to two days, that's 100% increase, right?

So it starts from a very low number.

So that's why it's a big percentage increase.

But absenteeism was up and people withdrawing hours, basically, I don't want to be around so much, right?

So those are the two measures that we saw.

And I think the interesting question about this, so we asked the company, you know, the employer, why would these cards be late?

And they said, well, it's not on purpose.

The boss probably just got busy or forgot, which makes it seem really trivial and forgiving, right?

Forgivable.

Yeah, no malicious intent.

No malicious intent.

However, if you're the employee...

And you're thinking about this and you're thinking, how much intent do you need to just hand me my freaking card?