The Angela Problem

Have thought about different instances of this problem across many years.

The specific -trivial- case:
Latest witnessed manifestation/reminder: Walking into a cafe where one big communal table is occupied by 8 people on their laptops (some drinking from their own refillable water bottles) no one seemed to be consuming anything. Sitting down at a small table, wanted to write for 20 minutes and lady at the counter told us no laptops at that table.

At the surface this makes sense: tables need to turn for the café to make money. Super sympathetic and understandable.
But the real issue is generalized rules that are the results of passive-aggresive avoidance of confrontation.

Any business owner wants people to come, consume, have a great time and move-on. The issue is when people start coming with laptops and sitting down for hours without consuming anything. The simplest solution is to ban laptops (and make the chairs and tables tiny and uncomfortable). That is because no one wants to confront a patron, let alone dozens of them every day.
One café we used to go to had at first look a quite direct message on each table along the lines of: You have the table for 2 hours, this is a restaurant!.

People abusing cafés as free coworking spaces forces owners/operators into this but the Angela problem (named after Angela from the office) is to pick a suboptimal passive aggressive policy instead of thinking about something a bit more fair for everyone, for example:
- Hello we are a restaurant that makes money by selling food and coffee. If you want to stay on this table for more than 90 minutes please keep ordering or give your table to a new patron, thanks!!

The META Problem(s)

Culture, Behaviors and Norms
I am actually not This passionate about café policies! But I do witness this type of behavior across teams and organization big and small. What should be one hard discussion a manager or HR need to do with one employee becomes a passive agressive policy implemented on hundreds of people.
What should be one confrontation of bad behavior in a group becomes a set of rules and guidelines and “reminders” about the rules and guideliness sent to dozens/hundreds of people.

Compensation and Rentention
In Order to avoid confrontation and awkward discussions many companies approach compensation when it comes to giving raises and bonuses the same way. Here’s the total budget, top performers get a 6% increase and ‘middle performers’ 3% and maybe even the bottom groups gets a small raise too.
Instead, top absolute top performers should be getting 50 or a 100% raises and bonuses and the rest getting a tough conversation instead. So the top performers are perpetually demotivated and end up leaving and the organization trends towards mediocrity.

Confrontation is NOT FUN! But if that’s what it takes to spare the majority from getting barraged with reminders about some guideliness then it is worth it.