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The recipe list lost all credibility with > Find the most productive employee you have which the author admitted you can't accurately do. This is a recipe fo

by p4wnc6 10y ago

The recipe list lost all credibility with > Find the most productive employee you have which the author admitted you can't accurately do. This is a recipe for disaster, not because reducing people to cold, heartless quantitative metrics is necessarily bad, but because this is totally subjective, and will ultimately devolve into simply rating the people you happen to like as "more productive" or giving them free passes with the "special skills/circumstances" column (for example, imagine if that column came to simply represent diversity criteria). Someone considered for termination due to being low in the CPUP ordering is probably more likely just someone that people don't like, or someone who does a great job but within a business unit that some other political rival wants to defeat, disband, or re-org in order to consolidate internal political control. Also, it's very reasonable for people to discount profit sharing pay. Such pay is generally less specifically defined in employment agreements, easier for an employer to omit for arbitrary reasons, affected not just by one's own performance but also performance of others. These are wage risks that a given employee largely cannot diversify away. Whereas with salary, there are many legal protections preventing an employer from omitting salary without documented cause. The more of your pay that is arbitrarily discretionary and at the whim of your employer's choice, the more variance there is in your overall wage outcomes, and if you're risk averse (as many people are when it comes to wages) you'll very rationally discount the value of that kind of wage stream compared to a wage stream with far lower risk. I also wonder if this employer does basic things, like giving all knowledge workers private offices. If the employer doesn't do that, but then does judge the workers on their productivity, it's exceedingly hypocritical, and a red flag of a bad employer. I liked the way this was stated in the classic software productivity book Peopleware (paraphrasing ...) > If the employer did not care enough about protecting everyone's productivity [e.g. by using obviously cost effective technology like private offices in the first place], then I'm not going to kill myself to make up that productivity lag. An employer who actually cares about productivity will provide workers with all the things they need to actually be productive: state of the art tools, adequate access to privacy and quiet space, adequate vacation and rest time, adequate work/life balance, positive and collegial atmosphere, transparency about performance expectations and appraisals, etc. They will make the office (and the non-physical workflow structures of the organization) into a place that facilitates getting work done instead of being something that you get work done in spite of. Obviously, I can't say how it plays out for this particular employer, but most often all you ever see is that the employer points fingers at employees and makes arbitrary and erratic and politically motivated decisions about who to promote, fire, or give a raise. Rarely will they ever point the finger at themselves and say, "How is it that I am failing as a manager to provide the right sort of workplace that would help this worker reach a higher CPUP [or whatever]." Given all of this, it's a very reasonable heuristic to simply call bullshit on employers who say this crap. Yes, maybe this is the one-in-a-million employer who actually takes a humanity-affirming perspective to it. But you're probably better off just assuming this employer is not such a rare case, and just avoiding them because of all the red flags this emits.

joelx 10y ago
Thank you for this response, I am the author / employer. I am looking for feedback on if my method is effective at achieving the goal it has. You raise some reasonable concerns about the fairness of the system and especially if workplace politics could unfairly influence which individuals are laid off. For my business specifically, I am the owner so playing any games with politics would only damage the business and my equity in it. In general, isn't this how managers determine which employees to promote / keep / fire anyways? They try to identify the worst performers and let them go, and identify the best performers and give them raises or promotions? My thought is my system just takes that subjective methodology and simply makes the manager think about it consciously rather than subconsciously. Is there a better method?
- p4wnc6 10y ago
  Not that it applies to you, but in my experience, small companies with a single owner or a small group of founders are sometimes the very worst in regards to politics. They will always say (and may even believe) they are doing things out of a pragmatic interest in the business's success, and often will definitely say something like "at my company we don't have politics issues" ... but it's just not true. Either they are openly duplicitous and only say those things because they believe it creates an outward message of stability that positively affects workers (generally it doesn't), or they really believe that whatever their particular actions are, they are not motivated by politics even when in truth they are overwhelmingly motivated by politics. If owners enter 'dictator mode' it can be very hard to separate out what is cognitive dissonance vs. what is a genuine attempt to manage a business without politics. As far as your question goes, I think it begins with a fundamentally different outlook. You write about it in terms of who to promote / keep / fire as if that is the right menu of options to orient your thoughts around. Instead, I'd say you should think more about how best to develop the workers you have. Firing people ought to be a distant thought that is only brought up under serious conditions, like overt misconduct, extreme underperformance over time or incompetence (that can't be corrected with training and investment). You strike me as someone who is not thinking in terms of employees as investments that payoff over time, but rather you are using some kind of hyperbolic discount function that only looks at some short window of recent productivity or some short forward-looking window of possible future productivity -- classic short-term thinking that leads to a lot of bad outcomes. If you just want some kind of cookbook style management process, you can find books endorsed by millionaires, billionaires, political leaders, athletes, coaches, etc. etc. and just pick whichever one tickles your personal confirmation bias fancy. (I'm not speaking just to you specifically, we all do this, certainly me included). So you can always justify pretty much anything you choose by saying, "isn't this how other people do it?" or "Wealthy Person X said to do it like this..." -- it doesn't actually mean you're making the right choice for your business. The other thing is that you conceive of your employees as falling on a linear ranking, which I feel is misguided. I think it is not possible to put a useful ordering on employees like that, because they are individuals and you can't discount their potential, drives, passions, personal circumstances, etc., all of which are changing often. There are all kinds of dimensions in which a person can be good or bad in their job for you, and there is almost surely no coherent "norm" you can define on that high-dimensional space that adequately orders employees ... and certainly not something entirely subjective like "who do I happen to think is most productive modulo special circumstances". Even if Person A is "more productive" than Person B, you don't know that will always be true. Maybe Person B is a faster learner, a more creative thinker, or has other latent talents that you have not properly tapped into yet. What you propose almost sounds like a proto form of stack ranking [0], which is a notoriously horrible way of doing things. But at least with stack ranking, you tended to receive scores from multiple people who function in mostly uncorrelated ways in the firm, so as to (mostly) remove dictator effects or sabotage effects. I don't think you could easily get that in a very small company where everyone knows everyone else and where the founder/owner is highly visible in day-to-day actions. Overall, I'd just generally recommend a totally different mindset. Stop trying to apportion wage to micro measurements of productivity. Just admit you (and everyone else) can't measure productivity well enough for that to be accurate and robust to social biases. Don't conceive of your lowest performers as candidates for termination. Rather, spend lots of time first seeing them as examples where your management style, workplace offerings, equip/tools/etc., have not been good enough to coax good performance out of them, and invest in them. View their payoff as something that happens over time, yes still with some discount rate more like bond pricing, but not so extreme that their short-term productivity counts for so much that it could lead to them being fired. If their productivity is low for a long time, after you have implemented many strategies for helping them improve, then you can be more confident that you're making a fair and correct decision to let them go. [0] < https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitality_curve https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitality_curve >

by p4wnc6 10y ago

joelx 10y ago

Thank you for this response, I am the author / employer. I am looking for feedback on if my method is effective at achieving the goal it has. You raise some reasonable concerns about the fairness of the system and especially if workplace politics could unfairly influence which individuals are laid off. For my business specifically, I am the owner so playing any games with politics would only damage the business and my equity in it. In general, isn't this how managers determine which employees to promote / keep / fire anyways? They try to identify the worst performers and let them go, and identify the best performers and give them raises or promotions? My thought is my system just takes that subjective methodology and simply makes the manager think about it consciously rather than subconsciously. Is there a better method?

p4wnc6 10y ago
Not that it applies to you, but in my experience, small companies with a single owner or a small group of founders are sometimes the very worst in regards to politics. They will always say (and may even believe) they are doing things out of a pragmatic interest in the business's success, and often will definitely say something like "at my company we don't have politics issues" ... but it's just not true. Either they are openly duplicitous and only say those things because they believe it creates an outward message of stability that positively affects workers (generally it doesn't), or they really believe that whatever their particular actions are, they are not motivated by politics even when in truth they are overwhelmingly motivated by politics. If owners enter 'dictator mode' it can be very hard to separate out what is cognitive dissonance vs. what is a genuine attempt to manage a business without politics. As far as your question goes, I think it begins with a fundamentally different outlook. You write about it in terms of who to promote / keep / fire as if that is the right menu of options to orient your thoughts around. Instead, I'd say you should think more about how best to develop the workers you have. Firing people ought to be a distant thought that is only brought up under serious conditions, like overt misconduct, extreme underperformance over time or incompetence (that can't be corrected with training and investment). You strike me as someone who is not thinking in terms of employees as investments that payoff over time, but rather you are using some kind of hyperbolic discount function that only looks at some short window of recent productivity or some short forward-looking window of possible future productivity -- classic short-term thinking that leads to a lot of bad outcomes. If you just want some kind of cookbook style management process, you can find books endorsed by millionaires, billionaires, political leaders, athletes, coaches, etc. etc. and just pick whichever one tickles your personal confirmation bias fancy. (I'm not speaking just to you specifically, we all do this, certainly me included). So you can always justify pretty much anything you choose by saying, "isn't this how other people do it?" or "Wealthy Person X said to do it like this..." -- it doesn't actually mean you're making the right choice for your business. The other thing is that you conceive of your employees as falling on a linear ranking, which I feel is misguided. I think it is not possible to put a useful ordering on employees like that, because they are individuals and you can't discount their potential, drives, passions, personal circumstances, etc., all of which are changing often. There are all kinds of dimensions in which a person can be good or bad in their job for you, and there is almost surely no coherent "norm" you can define on that high-dimensional space that adequately orders employees ... and certainly not something entirely subjective like "who do I happen to think is most productive modulo special circumstances". Even if Person A is "more productive" than Person B, you don't know that will always be true. Maybe Person B is a faster learner, a more creative thinker, or has other latent talents that you have not properly tapped into yet. What you propose almost sounds like a proto form of stack ranking [0], which is a notoriously horrible way of doing things. But at least with stack ranking, you tended to receive scores from multiple people who function in mostly uncorrelated ways in the firm, so as to (mostly) remove dictator effects or sabotage effects. I don't think you could easily get that in a very small company where everyone knows everyone else and where the founder/owner is highly visible in day-to-day actions. Overall, I'd just generally recommend a totally different mindset. Stop trying to apportion wage to micro measurements of productivity. Just admit you (and everyone else) can't measure productivity well enough for that to be accurate and robust to social biases. Don't conceive of your lowest performers as candidates for termination. Rather, spend lots of time first seeing them as examples where your management style, workplace offerings, equip/tools/etc., have not been good enough to coax good performance out of them, and invest in them. View their payoff as something that happens over time, yes still with some discount rate more like bond pricing, but not so extreme that their short-term productivity counts for so much that it could lead to them being fired. If their productivity is low for a long time, after you have implemented many strategies for helping them improve, then you can be more confident that you're making a fair and correct decision to let them go. [0] < https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitality_curve https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitality_curve >