Ratchet Effect In The Workplace / 职场棘轮效应

EP275 Token 通胀时代，谁还能“不可替代”？丨“人在中流”特别策划01 adds the AI adoption version through AI Productivity Ratchet / AI 生产率棘轮. 陈明霞 warns that people who use AI well can become the busiest employees if the organization treats AI-assisted output as a new baseline without redesigning reward, scope, review responsibility, or recovery.

Ratchet effect in the workplace is 79.各位领导，但凡咱学点博弈论：契约理论如何解释职场管理’s explanation for why employees may hesitate to reveal peak effort immediately. The episode defines the ratchet effect as a pattern where past performance becomes the baseline for future demands, making upward target adjustment hard to reverse.

The source’s employee-side advice is not simple laziness. It asks workers to manage expectations under information asymmetry: if a new employee gives 100% from the start, a manager may treat that as ordinary capacity and keep raising tasks beyond a sustainable level.

Key Claims

• Performance baselines are signals, and managers may not know whether an output level is normal, lucky, or at the worker’s limit.
• Ratcheting can make high effort self-punishing when future targets rise without matching resources or rewards.
• Managers can reduce the effect through relative performance comparison, explicit career ladders, rotation, or seniority-based elements.
• The tradeoff is real: mechanisms that protect employees from ratcheting can reduce efficiency or precision if designed poorly.
• EP275 adds that AI can intensify the ratchet because prompt work, review work, and accountability may remain hidden while speed becomes visible.

Connections

• Workplace Incentive Design, Subjective Performance Incentives / 主观绩效激励, and Mixed Incentive Contracts / 组合激励契约 - management design branch.
• Signal Design / 信号设计 and Information Asymmetry In Contracts / 契约中的信息不对称 - why output becomes a contested signal.
• Goodhart’s Law and Workplace Metric Gaming - adjacent measurement-incentive pages.
• AI Productivity Ratchet / AI 生产率棘轮, AI Job Security Anxiety, AI Use Pacing, and AI Brain Fry - AI-era extension where increased tool capability can raise expectations and supervision load.