> Office work is increasingly just adult daycare much of the time.
And the 'metrics' for productivity are completely gamed, in any direction, at any time arbitrarily.
Management/those that set these policies can 'turn up the heat' or relax them at any time, without warning. I've been on both sides of this.
Sure, you can hit some metric if some real product is produced, like widgets or something, but even in that hypothetical example, what if someone is top producer but skimps on quality or something resulting in a shorter lifespan of the product?
Before I left a recent employer a very (statistically and materially; i.e he was both very good at 'playing the game' and actually doing, you know, skilled work) high performer was PIPd (for "low performance").
In the previous half-decade+ he was there, he got 'exceeds' and top rankings every single year and was presumably paid more than the managers but was forced out, likely due to pay and internal politics.
I take most measures of 'productivity' to be totally fake, just based on my experience.
> I take most measures of 'productivity' to be totally fake, just based on my experience.
Same. Having worked everywhere from tiny storefronts all the way up to the SV Big Leagues, "productivity" and "performance" as a measure is complete bullshit. The only measure that matters at the end of the day is corporate profit, and so long as the company is earning more than it spends while compensating workers to thrive in their communities, then any other measure of human capital is irrelevant.
Instituting KPIs for human capital only leads to the most toxic people thriving in an organization, because they have no compunction gaming the system for their own ends. Remove the KPIs and force management to deal with interpersonal conflicts and skill gaps again, and suddenly your org will start dropping bad people and retaining good workers.
EDIT: Adding that, especially in technical fields, KPIs will miss substantial improvements 100% of the time because they only measure what the business wants to measure. No KPI can accurately track replacing a six-month timeline for bespoke OS images with a 15 minute Packer pipeline, and most managers can't or won't recognize the outsized impact of such a contribution. Worse yet, organizations overly dependent on measuring human capital via KPIs will penalize such an efficiency gain, because it harms those gaming the KPIs for their own ends.
Stop measuring human capital with KPIs is the lesson, here. Evaluating performance is literally why you have managers.
And the 'metrics' for productivity are completely gamed, in any direction, at any time arbitrarily.
Management/those that set these policies can 'turn up the heat' or relax them at any time, without warning. I've been on both sides of this.
Sure, you can hit some metric if some real product is produced, like widgets or something, but even in that hypothetical example, what if someone is top producer but skimps on quality or something resulting in a shorter lifespan of the product?
Before I left a recent employer a very (statistically and materially; i.e he was both very good at 'playing the game' and actually doing, you know, skilled work) high performer was PIPd (for "low performance").
In the previous half-decade+ he was there, he got 'exceeds' and top rankings every single year and was presumably paid more than the managers but was forced out, likely due to pay and internal politics.
I take most measures of 'productivity' to be totally fake, just based on my experience.