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I am not convinced. Reading the whole article it seems that Bayer is moving to a system better known as QBR, mixed with OKRs and most likely some sort of agile
by _the_inflator 3y ago
I am not convinced. Reading the whole article it seems that Bayer is moving to a system better known as QBR, mixed with OKRs and most likely some sort of agile model.
There is no no-hierarchies. Working in a 3 month cadence on an organizational level puts a lot of pressure on all people. Usually QBRs work top down and there is more monitoring along the process.
What sounds great is more or less success theatre as well as inflexibility. No one wants to lack behind in a QBR report. Risking 4 times a year being red flagged in a report sparks fear.
Also approval processes and idea sharing are the first victims of such reorganizations. No one risks a 2 week sprint for some improvement sprint or working on technical debt in tech for example.
I’ve seen this within a company with 100k employees worldwide.
People will regret QBRs.
Usually companies want to get rid of the costs of middle managers, which are usually elder than normal staffers. Also companies want to include younger folks, because they are on average cheaper per resource from a controlling perspective.
Young guns without leadership with delivery pressure by an even older senior management layer means having a large gap and divide between them.
Senior management adds so called assistants to their staff, the hidden layer.
I watched a lot of mobbing at the lower level as a result. Fear of tumbling over mistakes aka receiving a bad performance review is rampant when you need to report all the time results.
Mixing teams every QBR sounds fun, but isn’t. It means even more being in constant competition. Who is the most flexible employee and most successful under different circumstances?
Large organizations are hard to manage. People will very soon miss their middle managers to cover things up in a human way.
QBRs don’t help if there is a clear product strategy missing.
There is no perfect system, but QBRs are some of the most toxic form of working and collaboration that I have witnessed so far.
- andrekandre 3y agonoob question: what does qbr stand for in this context? i thought maybe quarterly business review, but not sure after reading several descriptions around...
- QuantumGood 3y agoYou're correct, QBR = quarterly business review in this context
- JSDevOps 3y agoAsking for everyone here. What’s a QBR?
- hitekker 3y agoThis sounds so true. Before you had 1 or 2 bosses to report to, now you have 10, rotating in and out, whenever they please. If you've experienced the joy of a semi-yearly peer review system in a MegaCorp (e.g., Meta), imagine this happening all the time, with less structure, and even less shielding.
- _heimdall 3y agoI'm been really frustrated by OKRs specifically. The whole system does a great job of appearing to empower a bottom up approach while actually being implemented as a top down, authoritarian system. It sounds great to be metric and goal driven, allowing employees to decide for themselves how to best reach those business goals. I've never seem it implemented this way though. Instead, I've seen leaders define goals and solutions together, paired with a list of metrics used to define success so specifically that annual reviews and layoffs become an almost mathematical, robotic process.
- sdiupIGPWEfh 2y agoWe're explicitly given top-down OKRs, which we're required to align our own "bottom-up" OKRs to, and then we're not empowered to meet our own OKRs, because product management alone steers the ship.
- _heimdall 2y agoThat's how I've often seen it implemented as well. There's absolutely no point to OKRs when used that way, I assume its a sign that someone pushed through a big change in the name of efficiency and got a nice promotion out of it without anyone checking to see if it actually helped.
- novagameco 3y agoAt my last company, managers success was defined by their reports success, so if we didn't achieve our KPIs by the end of the quarter, my manager would say "You worked really hard this quarter, and I want to make sure you get your full bonus!" then he would just lower the KPI metrics until we achieve ~80% of them (because our CEO believed if you are achieving more than 80% of your goals, then your goals aren't ambitious enough)
- eitally 2y agoI always found it really interesting at Google that OKRs generally seemed to make sense at the CEO & PA level, but massively broke down somewhere between VP->Dir->Team level, to the extent that for the majority of teams it was nearly impossible to identify clear OKRs for themselves that trickled down (or flowed up) to the OKRs that should have been inheritable by their management chain. Some orgs manage to get to the Director level, but in others the break happened at the VP level, which just meant that entire large groups of Type A, highly productive people were mostly rudderless -- not to mention being at risk of poor performance reviews if their management chain weren't able to provide adequate air cover.
- mind-blight 3y agoI've of the best essays I've read explaining this kind of phenomenon is The Tyranny of Structurelessness (https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm). It's a critique from a feminist in the 70s account how the feminist movement's attempt to have no hierarchy created implicit hierarchies that were less accountable too the group than explicit hierarchies
- mjburgess 2y agoDemands for non-hierarchical political forms have always scared me, and so often, how they are demanded by people whose main skill is to rabble-rouse. Of course, this is no coincidence.
- Arcanum-XIII 2y agoIn an interview process they tried to sell this to me. So I asked the question of what would happen in case of disagrement. It would be solved magically by consensus... I told them no. No structure or too much structure leads to the same result: chaos. A different one, but well, not good in either case.
- lazide 2y agoYup. Explicit hierarchies result in explicit accountability. Implicit ones, well, ‘I’m not their boss, I don’t know why they did that!’
- seivan 2y ago[dead]
- downrightmike 2y agoSteam is a flat org and they only do things they want. Still no Half-Life 3 though.