Campbell's law: The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor.
The problem is when people disagree on performance, in isolation ("I don't deserve a 3 this quarter") or in relation ("why did X get a promotion instead of me"). Quantitative reviews are essentially your employer covering their ass. People might game the system, but there's a paper trail to back up their actions: "we hired Y, but they had a worse quantitative review than everyone else on the team and so was fired." 'Y' has no reasonable recourse, to sue or whatever.
Quantitative performance reviews are too valuable for labor relations.
That's it. Fight losing self-destructive battles if you feel you have to, but never forget it.
The options would seem to be:
- Openly state what the goals and metrics are, know that they’ll be gamed, shrug and just keep going.
- Don’t tell anyone your goals and metrics so they can’t become gamified, breed a culture of distrust where people are afraid they aren’t doing the right thing because they don’t know how they’re being evaluated. Of course, people could always guess what the metrics are and then all the upside goes away.
- Set qualitative goals that are evaluated on an “I mean what I mean, you know what I mean, right?” kind of basis. This can work optimally when a team is small, driven and tight-knit, but usually explodes when you try to scale it.
It’s not the responsibility of these philosophers to provide solutions, merely pointing out flaws is important enough. But for those of us trying to learn from those philosophies and then build things, we then have to figure out something to do.
- give employees and managers enough context to understand the business goals and empower them to make intelligent decisions and affect positive change
> First, however, it's worth mentioning that having a goal for attrition isn't inherently bad. In some ways, it's simply acknowledging reality and placing a measurement on what is already going to happen in a healthy environment.
Except if you keep that metric unknown to whoever is working on it. The main problem with measures is when they are widely communicated.
The problem with "hire to fire" as described here is that it fails those criteria (the meta-metrics, if you will). Knowing your company's attrition/turnover rate is good; communicating that metric, at least to managers, is (I would argue) also good. But using it as a target that your managers must not go under is toxic to work culture and employee morale.
Business is simply complex, you can always sacrifice an intangible like brand perception to tweak some metric. But, it’s the along term that represents the vast majority of a companies value.
At least assuming the company is likely to survive the next 2 years.
Maybe you can make a case that it was a very bad no good horrible thing for me to have done, but I'm going to respond that if you want your company to survive the next two years, you need to be know whether your company is doing the thing it is in business to do.
Sure, it's really easy to use metrics to create negative incentives. That's not an argument against using metrics. It's an argument against using metrics badly.
Anyway, there is a huge difference in collecting data and using a metric as a goal. Process improvement may involve measuring what specifically was causing delays and possibly changing things. Or perhaps using a more complex classification system where anything involving company X will always take an extra N days and everyone needs to know this ahead of time etc etc. The point is you need to make complex tradeoff perhaps company X is worth the delay.
Once the employees know this is being measured, they will presume it's also a goal, because why else measure it? Then they will act in ways to reduce the time between order and operational status. Is there any reason to believe that they won't game the measure, pushing orders to "operational" in ways that are detrimental to the business?
1. In a company with middle management, i.e., managers working for managers, you have to reveal the metric / target to them. Or at least, some manager will spill the beans and then it's not a secret any more.
2. Companies imitate one another, directly, or through managers who share a common background. Therefore, it's not hard to guess the metrics of one business by reading about similar businesses.
Thanks to these two channels, it's actually possible that the rank and file workers understand the business better than their managers do, because the workers have a broad range of information at their disposal if they read the business pages or even HN, whereas managers are obligated to embrace the official line. When a new metric is installed, chances are that the workers already understand it, and how to manipulate it.