Businesses can't seem to admit that they're spending money based on employee preference. There has to be a metrics-driven productivity or healthcare spending argument to justify the budget.
I had this discussion with a book keeper about a fancy chair for an employee once. The bookkeeper was arguing that this was more money than they had spent on a chair before and so it needed to be justified.
I justified it by saying, "We pay this individual over $100,000 a year, they are key to the following efforts, and the chair will last them for their entire career with the company. Not to mention it costs about 1% what we paid the recruiter who brought this person to us."
I made a similar argument at IBM (which got me into some trouble) which was that revenue per employee was up significantly from the period when everyone had an office, so why not have an office with some offices, some cubes, and some open space and let people work in the space where they are most productive? Total cost per employee was still going to be a lot less relative to their revenue generation than it had been in the past.
Too often people focus too closely on the one time costs and not the overall expense.
That's a really excellent point. If there's any risk that an employee would leave to run after a cheap perk like a standing desk or a good chair, it's just bad management to not spend that money.
Yes. Admitting input from the employees violates the hierarchy. The Platonic ideal of "business" is one in which ideas are formed from the "vision" from the CEO and everyone else is there to implement their will, in a hierarchical fashion. This is used to justify paying the CEO the salary of a thousand or ten thousand workers.
Admitting that the workers might know anything better than the management, even about their own preferences, is disruptive to this concept.
I'd add the many others in the hierarchy having their personal"vision" questioned by 'subordinates' creates the same problems you describe. Otherwise, you nailed it imho.
Data helps corporate management avoid personal responsibility, so it's not just "As a leader, I think..." but rather "Look at what the data is telling us to do." Yeah, it sucks.
This is why I personally value and respect leaders/supervisors who don't try to hide behind data: because they're personally invested in their decisions and actually demonstrate that they're in control with their hands on the steering wheel of their organizational unit (be it team or department or facility or company).
My previous supervisor (current coworker) was/is excellent about this. Yeah, of course the actual data will be front and center in the decisionmaking process, but he always makes a point to actually validate that data (through hands-on / direct observation or through his direct reports), knowing full well that there's no such thing as perfect data (there's always a missing metric or an unreliable source somewhere).
More importantly, he's willing to put himself behind his decisions, and always encouraged the rest of us to do the same for our own direct reports (and while I don't and didn't have any, I still took his lessons to heart): if you need to rely on / appeal to external sources of authority (be they higher-ups, data, "corporate policy", etc.) to assert your own authority, then your own authority is illusory, at best. By all means explain your reasoning, of course ("transparency is a dependency of trust" applies to any kind of computational system, including the kind that sits between our ears), but it should be clear that it's your reasoning, not someone (or something) else's.
Hmmph. Couldn't data be "I asked n employees what they thought of x, and y% of them said they strongly approved of the idea"? I once included a statement like that in a complaint about a wrongheaded decision involving company-paid meals, and the decision was subsequently reversed.
This is true, it’s why you go to your doctor and say, “my back hurts I want a standing desk,” then the doctor writes you a note which says “Jim seems to have back pain and a standing desk would help.”
