NY message from main manager

TELLIT01

My money would be on the task being passed over to his PA who got fed up with writing the longer message on every card. I can imagine people being 'unimpressed' if they were sitting on a break and realised in conversation that there was an implication that some had worked hard and others not.

HiToAll

those that got card 1 are thought not to work hard and will be fired in the new year.

Proxima_Centauri

Info10 wrote: »

Hi,
how would you explain a following situation - we are a group of around 40 people (construction specialists) working in a world leading company. As a Christmas present we have got postcards signed by the main manager of the project. There were two types of postcards with following text >
1. "Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!".
2. "Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year! Thanks for hard work in 2016."

a. Do you consider that this is a professional behavior from manager to differ employees and how come he can differ them?
b. Is it common in UK to do it? As the main manager is from UK, however it we work in a project not located in UK (it is located in Scandinavia).

What do you think about the message?
Thanks

I can imagine this type of thing putting the cat among the pigeons in an office environment, where petty things can often cause a domino-effect overreaction in people. One employee picks up on the slightly different wording, and tells another colleague, who then sides with them and moans to another colleague etc etc.

Fwiw I doubt if there's any more to it than they happened to use a slightly different batch of cards.

greenbee

At least they arrived before Christmas... our work cards always arrive after Christmas. I'm not sure why they bother!

paddyrg

3. Merry Christmas and Happy New Year. You bunch of slack gits.

If you didn't get a #3 card, you keep your job in January

Info10

Good comments, however :
- from 40 persons around 10 got just nr.1, others nr.2
- the main manager does not have direct (professional) contact during working time with all the 40 workers so he does not know how he/she worked during 2016 in reality
- there was only one batch of postcards

P.S. As I am not from UK, for me it was interested to see reaction and today I saw two "impressed" persons who were joking as they got nr.1 and persons sitting in front of him nr.2

So there was some kind of message from the main manager, however my opinion is that it was not really professional and correct text.
There are of course type of workers showing off to the manager when dealing with any kind of issue, and those who do it the "very calm" way, they often got nr.1 postcards.

[Deleted User]

bugslet wrote: »

Maybe you read too much into it?

Exactly - life happens, and in the grand scheme of things where does this sit?

z1a

Are all 40 of you women? I can't imagine any men worrying about this.

Proxima_Centauri

z1a wrote: »

Are all 40 of you women? I can't imagine any men worrying about this.

well, I didn't want to say that, but...

duchy

Are you the sort of person who checks previous text messages and worries if your partner puts one rather than two X's at the end of a message ?