November 11, 2019

More about the workplace.stackexchange forum

The working hypothesis from the previous blog post was, that the https://workplace.stackexchange.com/ website is biased in a way, that the relationship boss, employee and customer is fixed. The boss is on top of the pyramid, then comes the employee and the customer can be ignored. To examine if the hypothsis is right for most of posted content on the workplace forum the first step is to search the postings with the aim to identify a counter situation, in which the hypothesis doesn't work.

How many questions are available about “how criticize the boss”? I didn't found a single one. What is in the database is how to praise the boss, how to obey to the boss and how to become the friend of the boss. Here https://workplace.stackexchange.com/questions/105766/how-do-i-respond-to-constant-small-criticism-from-a-supervisor/ is an example given which shows very well what the assumption in the workplace forum is. It's exactly the initial hypothesis, that the boss is on top of the pyramid and it's up to the employee and up to the customer to react.

The opposite management principle over “boss is on top” is called self-organizing team and agile management. Thanks to the search box in the workplace forum it's pretty easy to identify postings about the topic. The first thing what can be observed is, that questions about agile management are very likely to become closed as offtopic. It seems, that the idea itself is perceived as not relevant for the website. The same is true for questions which are labeled with the tag “scrum”. They are available on the website, but only a few of them.