alt Hacker News> late birthday recognition.
if someone is going to feel slighted and similar things add up to them working less, they probably are not a great colleague to begin with.
What matters more are: assignment to rewarding work, get paid top dollar, not be bored, get recognition for success, coaching on career growth, given leeway to make mistakes, not overlooked for promotion, etc.
Now, as a people manager, if you're not steering those kinds of things, you are not a great manager and you should be replaced with someone who does those things.
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People are emotional and react in unexpected ways to even the smallest perceived slights, myself included.
A late birthday recognition might not feel important, but if one already feels like management doesn't care about them? I can easily seeing that as a confirmation of it that causes resentment. I can also see it doing the same for any number of management related issues.
I can tell you personally that the action which most seriously affected my performance at a workplace was being denied a bereavement day because the official policy was to only allow one. I felt more than slighted and every single negative action taken afterwards by HR/management, no matter how small, caused me to resent them more.
Being primarily interested in money and career advancement would also make you not a great colleague in many people’s eyes. It’s rather subjective.
The example was a birthday card, but the mechanism is more important: the manager disregarded a policy in a way that was disrespectful to a specific employee.
People don’t care about the birthday card. They care when the manager does something nice for everyone but them.
Nobody cares about a pizza party, they care that the manager didn’t think to save any pizza for the team that had to do an emergency call out to a client site during lunch.