When goodwill goes bad

Would you sue your employer if you didn’t receive a leaving card? A recent story in The Guardian suggested one woman had attempted to do just that – only to learn at the subsequent tribunal that a colleague had prepared a card but not given it to her because he was embarrassed that only three people had signed it.

There’s a lot more to this particular case – the complainant brought a total of 40 claims covering a harassment, victimisation and unfair dismissal (all of which were dismissed). But her claim that the lack of a card was an example of the discrimination highlights the way that small acts of goodwill, which seem like a simple way to make employees feel valued and recognised, can end up being flashpoints for other feelings of dissatisfaction in the context of the workplace.

If you already feel underappreciated at work, seeing your team bring in cake for someone else’s birthday when they missed yours is more likely to provoke a strong emotional reaction and reinforce your feelings of being overlooked. (This isn’t necessarily a bad thing if you are indeed undervalued and this gives you the impetus you need to find a better job).

There’s also the danger that gestures like cards can be weaponised precisely as the tribunal claimant believed. It can be difficult to prove whether you’ve been deliberately excluded or just forgotten. Even if you know you’ve been excluded, it can feel like a trivial matter to escalate – if you’re going to go through the effort and turmoil of reporting a colleague to HR, you might feel like it has to be for a more serious incident. But that doesn’t make the exclusion any less hurtful.

Such gestures only work when they feel authentic

Introducing simple gestures like cards for special occasions to the workplace can seem like an easy win – it’s low cost and suggests that you care about employees as people, rather than as work-producing units. But such gestures only work when they feel authentic. Ensuring that all employees receive cards means it can’t just be left for their closer colleagues to manage (think of how difficult it can be to keep track of all your family’s birthdays). Instead, it has to be someone’s working responsibility to make sure all cards are delivered on time – which not only depersonalises the gesture, but can even turn what should be an act of goodwill into a chore.

The best way to value employees is to recognise and reward them throughout their whole time at the company, not just on special occasions. Without this underlying basis, cards and cake are empty gestures – which makes it doubly demoralising when people forget to give you one.