3 ms·
The problem isn't measurement, it is tying rewards to achieving certain measurements. People will do what you reward them for doing, even if that isn't what you
by Perdition 12y ago
The problem isn't measurement, it is tying rewards to achieving certain measurements. People will do what you reward them for doing, even if that isn't what you actually wanted them to do.
The real issue is that identifying the correct things to measure and reward is really, really hard.
I read once about a factory that was trying to improve output so they started rewarding shifts of workers for reaching production goals. But to achieve those goals workers started cutting corners and quality went down. So the company installed a device to measure the quality of the widgets, which worked for a while but then quality went down again. The workers had figured out they could just keep measuring the same in-spec widget over and over again to make the machine happy. Next the company altered the quality measurement machine so that it would issue an error if it did two identical measurements in a row. Again quality went up for a while until the workers figured out they could just rotate a couple of good parts through the machine to fool it.
- hibikir 12y agoI have a good book on the subject: Measuring and Managing Performance in Organizations. The TL;DR version is that any job worth doing has some hard to measure components, so the best you will get using measures as incentives is to lag in the hard to measure parts. So the recommendation is not to stop measuring, but to make individual measurements invisible to management, and be just tools that people can use to improve their own performance. If your team is doing far worse than average in a measurement that you all find important, you will work on it anyway.