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It is Friday after 5 p.m. Olek closes his laptop while Marek is still working.
— I’m done. This can wait until Monday.
— When I started, staying late was part of proving people could rely on you.
Olek is asking whether that cost was ever necessary. Marek hears a question about whether years of his own effort meant anything.
How does Empatyzer separate useful learning from empty ritual?
Empatyzer helps you see that just because older employees incurred the cost, it doesn't mean newer employees have to, too. It also allows you to check how to distinguish necessary science from unnecessary ritual.
Features that can help:
- Organisational culture: Shows the preferred and actual organisational culture, which helps check whether the "I had this too" situation has to do with the dominant norm of the company or team, and not just the character of the people.
- Your values: They help you name what values are behind your reaction to the "I had it too" situation and why the same norm may have a completely different meaning for two people.
- Talk to Em about your team: Allows you to discuss the "I had this too" problem with Em in the context of the entire team and establish a shared rule that prevents similar misunderstandings in the future.
What really happened
Marek once went through a demanding norm and paid for it in time, stress or effort. When Olek suggests that newer employees should not have to pay the same price, Marek may hear more than a process change: “what I went through was pointless.” Defending the old rule can then become partly about defending the meaning of his own experience. Olek is starting from a different point: if a cost is not necessary to achieve the goal, repeating it does not become fair merely because earlier employees had to bear it. One person is seeking equality of experience; the other wants to remove an unnecessary cost.
What the research says
People can become more inclined to justify a system or ritual when it is longstanding, widespread and something they have already invested in. Research on “trials by fire” for newcomers shows that observers are more likely to justify difficult initiation practices when those practices are long-established traditions in a tightly integrated group—a pattern connected to system justification (Mawritz et al., 2019). A related mechanism is effort justification: the effort we have already invested can increase the value we attach to what we achieved through it. That does not mean every difficult path is bad. It means that “I suffered too” is not, by itself, evidence that suffering was a necessary part of learning.
How to handle it
Instead of asking “was it hard?”, ask “what exactly did the difficulty teach, and could we teach the same thing at lower cost?” You can respect Marek’s experience without reproducing its burden: “What you went through was real effort. Precisely because you went through it, we now know what can be improved.” The general rule: fairness does not have to mean equal suffering. If the value of an experience can be preserved while an unnecessary cost is removed, improving the system does not invalidate the people who paid that cost before.
How Empatyzer and Em can help
Empatyzer can help Marek understand why Olek’s proposal sounds like a challenge to his own history even though Olek is only talking about the future. Motivators related to order, status, honour or fairness can make past hardship part of the answer to “what did I earn this through?” Em can help Olek propose change without stripping that meaning away: “The harder path you went through was real effort. But we do not have to require the same cost from the next person if it no longer adds value.” It can also help Marek separate recognition of his own effort from the need to reproduce that effort in others. Micro-lessons reinforce the idea that fairness does not always mean imposing an identical cost on each new generation of employees.
Sources
- Bryan J. Thomas; Pamela Meglich (2019). Justifying new employees’ trials by fire: workplace hazing. Personnel Review, 48(2), 381-399. https://doi.org/10.1108/PR-01-2018-0025 10.1108/PR-01-2018-0025
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