At this point, tone deaf employers and management are basically the default. However, that doesn’t mean that some employers aren’t still finding ways to take their profound inability to read a room to a whole new level! Like, say, one company’s system of rewarding workers that is somehow even more insulting than the legendary pizza party-instead-of-a-raise nonsense.
Now we’ve heard everything. Giving workers literally anything instead of more money is old hat nowadays — heck, it’s become standard operating procedure to give workers “gifts” that they have to actually pay for through paycheck reductions or tax bills. We are in a golden age of giving employees nothing and telling them to like it!
But there are things like the “baked potato bar in lieu of a bonus” debacle that went viral a few years ago, and then there’s what’s going on at a company that runs a group of big-name foodservice franchises around the country.
According to a Reddit postthe company’s way of rewarding its employees for a job well done is to thank them with a program literally named after a pay increase — that involves nothing more than a slip of paper with a compliment on it.
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“My girlfriend’s job gave her another ‘RAISE,'” the Redditor wrote in his post, noting that it was just one of several reasons she was planning to quit. He included a photo of the “raise” in question — a slip of paper titled “R.A.I.S.E.,” which stands for “Recognizing Amazing Individual Service Experiences.” (Don’t roll your eyes so hard, they might get stuck.)
Below the “R.A.I.S.E.” title is a space for a manager to write their compliment, in this case, kudos for “improving drive time results for night time,” presumably a reference to good drive-through service efficiency.
Reddit | Canva Pro
After providing the statistics for the worker’s “exceptional” performance, the manager added “keep up the motivation,” which doesn’t really make syntactic sense but is lovely nonetheless. And that’s it. That’s the sum total of the recognition. Congrats?
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Here’s the thing: a job is not kindergarten. Nobody should need a gold star to do their job well, and many people never even get so much as a thank you at work, let alone actual recognition. The program itself isn’t the problem. The underlying idea is even kind of nice!
But calling it “R.A.I.S.E.”? Listen, guys, you can just spit directly in your employees’ faces while mocking their mothers. You don’t have to go to the trouble of printing out all these little notepads — time and money that COULD have been used to give your employees actual rewards, by the way!
This is pretty astonishingly insulting, and shows just how completely out-of-touch most management is. Do they honestly think that ANY worker is going to see this slip of paper and not be IMMEDIATELY reminded of the fact that they’re underpaid?
As you might expect, Reddit wasn’t feeling the “R.A.I.S.E.” love. Users called it “a blatant slap in the face,” and marveled that “somebody actually thought this was a good idea, and then got them printed up and everything.”
If this was supposed to be an employee retention move to keep workers nice and docile, it’s a profoundly stupid one. Because the bottom line is that food service jobs are a dime a dozen, and even most of the worst ones don’t come with being patronized and insulted like this.
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John Sundholm is a writer, editor, and video personality with 20 years of experience in media and entertainment. He covers culture, mental health, and human interest topics.
