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OwlFancier posted:Having specific metrics that constitute "doing your job properly" simply results in adjusting what you do to produce those metrics even if it doesn't actualy make any sense, and tracking job performance on those metrics therefore serves to obfuscate failures in the process because the KPIs are being hit, what could possibly be wrong? this is not the hill i want to die on but... having *badly defined* KPI's means you game them. what is the alternative to measuring performance? gut-feel?
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Jan 12, 2023 10:34
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Rustybear posted:this is not the hill i want to die on but... having *badly defined* KPI's means you game them. I would suggest that any attempt to reduce a job to a set of trackable metrics is going to fall afoul of gaming them to some degree, if you want to comprehensively describe a job using metrics you're going to spend more time documenting than you are actually doing the job. I run into this a lot in my own job, either the documentation of what I do is sparse, in which case I focus what I am doing to meet those documented metrics (which is also what the customer is in reality paying for, so this isn't even me doing my job "wrong" but it certainly isn't the thing I should be doing to, for example, increase sales for them) or the job is hyper-metricised in which case I spend so much time documenting and filling in the metrics that I am mostly being paid to do that, and thus I get very little actually of value done. In either case my company gets the information they need to make it look like we are adding value for the client, as specified by the client so they usually come back quite happy, and in neither case am I actually doing the sort of thing that would actually be helpful to the client. Fundamentally I think the attempt to plot job performance on a graph with tracked metrics just... doesn't work? Inherently it does not work, because if a job is complex enough that you need a human to do it, then it is complex enough that doing it properly is a thing you can't really quantify, it will include exceptions and situations that your metrics did not account for and which if you encourage your workers to ignore them because they are not being tracked on them, will degrade the actual quality of the service provided, while simultaneously obfuscating why that is happening because you're only looking at your tracked metrics. This is especially true of anything with a customer facing element. The alternative is people simply need to want to do their job, and be given leeway to do it in a manner that works, and be supported by their managers in doing this. Ultimately you have to trust that people want to do a good job, you can't force good work out of them with metrics, and you can't micromanage them every step of the way if they aren't motivated to do it themselves. And trying to metricise them is going to actively discourage the kind of self directed good work that you will need some of the time, and probably piss them off in general so they just don't give a poo poo because turning your job into making specific numbers go up is profoundly unappealing. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 10:47 on Jan 12, 2023 |
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Jan 12, 2023 10:44
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Rustybear posted:this is not the hill i want to die on but... having *badly defined* KPI's means you game them. The alternative is actually employing people with the employment protections that entails and guaranteed rates of pay rather than using 'contractors' who you can force to work to unreasonable targets in order to scrape a survivable wage
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Jan 12, 2023 10:45
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Past a certain point any ultra-Taylorist approach is just going to turn into the old joke about a Soviet steelworks that becomes an auditing company that produces steel as a side product. And like most jokes about the former USSR many large companies have decided that it's good actually if they can do that with an app instead.
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Jan 12, 2023 10:48
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"HAM!"
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Jan 12, 2023 10:49
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I get that feeling a lot at work. Sometimes for an hour long job I spend 45 minutes of it filling out paperwork describing what I did in the other 15 in minute detail so that a computer can compile it at the end, rather than spending 55 minutes doing something useful and 5 at the end giving rough totals and a verbal description of the work.
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Jan 12, 2023 10:50
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well one person's gaming the system is another's innovation, if the customer is happy the customer is happy... i think the situation you're describing is one where management is trying to manage by metric alone which is obviously a disaster because you cannot represent reality in a dashboard. management need to get out of their office and listen to people on the shopfloor etc. which is tedious and boring and requires them to be able to be told they're wrong to their face and openly accept it. all traits which are not commonly selected for in managers. don't forget that if you remove your official KPI's you are still being managed by metric, only the metrics are now unsaid and may include things like ratio of your face fitting in and % of times you laughed at the boss's jokes Rustybear fucked around with this message at 10:57 on Jan 12, 2023 |
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Jan 12, 2023 10:55
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Tsaedje posted:The alternative is actually employing people with the employment protections that entails and guaranteed rates of pay rather than using 'contractors' who you can force to work to unreasonable targets in order to scrape a survivable wage agreed but DPD and Evri drivers are still full time employees i thought? not an industry i know anything about admittedly.
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Jan 12, 2023 10:56
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Evri only hires shotputters. They're still horrendous
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Jan 12, 2023 10:57
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Measuring delivery metrics isn't hard and is perfectly useful for seeing if your employees are actually doing their job, it's just that the expected number of deliveries is way too tight. Getting rid of those metrics won't make anyone's jobs easier, they just need to employ more drivers.
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Jan 12, 2023 11:01
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Rustybear posted:well one person's gaming the system is another's innovation, if the customer is happy the customer is happy... If you organize an entire company around people measuring each other on bad metrics that don't represent useful work, then everyone is happy while actual production of useful things collapses, and then everyone goes "well how could we have foreseen this?"
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Jan 12, 2023 11:02
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Doctor_Fruitbat posted:Measuring delivery metrics isn't hard and is perfectly useful for seeing if your employees are actually doing their job, it's just that the expected number of deliveries is way too tight. Getting rid of those metrics won't make anyone's jobs easier, they just need to employ more drivers. Encouraging people to write off deliverires as "attempted" without actually attempting them, doing only the bare minimum to make it look as if they have, is specifically what produces the behaviour people are commenting on and is directly responsible for the poor reputation of the company, and again, obfuscates that the issue is a lack of drivers. If, rather than saying "I don't have enough time to deliver all these parcels" people are instead saying "yeah I tried to deliver them all but loads of people weren't in, pay me please" as encouraged by the KPIs, that's going to cause problems for the company. And you could quite reasonably ask, how else are you supposed to manage drivers? To which i would suggest, you can't. You can't find a way to make drivers do their job by measuring every loving aspect of their existence without driving them off the job or encouraging them to game the gently caress out of it. It is probably an inherent issue to the idiotic "everything must be shuttled to me personally by someone the next day" mindset that necessitates the profusion of lovely delivery jobs in the first place. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 11:12 on Jan 12, 2023 |
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Jan 12, 2023 11:04
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Doctor_Fruitbat posted:Measuring delivery metrics isn't hard and is perfectly useful for seeing if your employees are actually doing their job, it's just that the expected number of deliveries is way too tight. Getting rid of those metrics won't make anyone's jobs easier, they just need to employ more drivers. It’s the way of business these days, ruthless drive towards efficiency that ends up dismantling all resilience against anything outside of perfect conditions. Fun and timely example - look how Twitter had essentially ‘overbuilt’ their service to almost eliminate outages, then some new idiot takes over and sees all the ‘efficiency savings’ to be made by firing staff and taking data centres offline, and now the bugginess of the platform increases day-by-day.
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Jan 12, 2023 11:11
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OwlFancier posted:If you organize an entire company around people measuring each other on bad metrics that don't represent useful work, then everyone is happy while actual production of useful things collapses, and then everyone goes "well how could we have foreseen this?" sounds like you need to be measuring 'actual production of useful things' then
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Jan 12, 2023 11:14
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Rustybear posted:sounds like you need to be measuring 'actual production of useful things' then What do you think they're trying to do? At what point does the repeated inability to do that constitute a failure of the idea to begin with? It's not like we have lots of other example of things that theoretically should be reducible to measurable quantities and yet every attempt to do so results in some sort of horror show.
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Jan 12, 2023 11:17
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OwlFancier posted:What do you think they're trying to do? in general i'd say we're pretty good at collecting data and measurements and using them to learn things about the world, can always be better of course
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Jan 12, 2023 11:29
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The problem with KPIs is that what a manager thinks is a KPI is actually just an arbitrary thing their brain is capable of measuring, whereas a real KPI contributes to the overall benefit of the operation. (pauses for breath) Keyboard-Penis Interface
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Jan 12, 2023 11:40
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Failed Imagineer posted:Ol' Johnny Insulation as his parents call him. One guy one marrow.
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Jan 12, 2023 11:41
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forkboy84 posted:Some heart warming news I almost got a headache from reading this tweet and trying to figure out what it was saying since it uses so much double speak. Basically, it is saying that more students from disadvantaged backgrounds were accepted to University programmes (such as law ) due to Scottish Government initiative. The newspaper is framing this as bad as it means students from well-off backgrounds are missing out on these places. But it's using such contradictory language you could easily mistake it into saying the opposite of what it means.
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Jan 12, 2023 11:53
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My partner did law at Glasgow Uni a couple of years ago. She was the only person who either went to a state comp, or who's parents weren't lawyers. She's also now the only person at her firm who wasn't privately educated.
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Jan 12, 2023 11:56
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Been working under various KPI structures the last 15 years. They are all easy to game, and the only end result is that the company can fix it to pay whatever bonuses they want to pay to you with them.
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Jan 12, 2023 12:07
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happyhippy posted:Been working under various KPI structures the last 15 years. Precisely. My company brought in something called like a "competencies architecture " (I forget exactly) for the junior employees - essentially a big spreadsheet of all the things you should be able to do in your job. Some people were pleased that this would be a useful tool to help them progress up the corporate ladder. No, to the contrary
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Jan 12, 2023 12:14
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It's not just the staff that game KPIs the outsourcer I work for regularly game their high level stats to keep clients happy. It keeps me in a job (making up good stats) so I'm cool with it. Our clients are all aware of this, it's all kayfabe. They game the stats for their bosses too. keep punching joe fucked around with this message at 12:19 on Jan 12, 2023 |
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Jan 12, 2023 12:15
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Gambrinus posted:Which Twitter account is it? It's at @Pharmcheckersc1 I don't know who wrote it and I don't know who posted it but lol, lmao
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Jan 12, 2023 12:20
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regarding delivery and these little kpi doodahs, the problem is also as people have mentioned earlier that there is no real feedback loop from the customer. There is noone you can ring or yell at and the online multiple choice thing doesnt let you address what your issue actually is. So everything is fine because that number they use is where it should be.
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Jan 12, 2023 12:29
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Please say the first three characters of your tracking number. Please say the second three characters of your tracking number. Please say the third three characters of your tracking number. Please say the last three characters of your tracking number. Your parcel has been delivered. Thank you.
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Jan 12, 2023 12:33
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at least hitler brushed their hair!
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Jan 12, 2023 12:40
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His hair was short; he would have used a comb.
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Jan 12, 2023 12:55
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NotJustANumber99 posted:regarding delivery and these little kpi doodahs, the problem is also as people have mentioned earlier that there is no real feedback loop from the customer. There is noone you can ring or yell at and the online multiple choice thing doesnt let you address what your issue actually is. So everything is fine because that number they use is where it should be. This is what I was trying to get at with my previous post. The actual service supposedly being provided is wrapped in an impenetrable black box that is ONLY interactive via the little bloopy handsets that the delivery drivers and Parcelshop staff have. It's supposed to be this series frictionless automated transaction, but is actually a mechanical Turk situation where even if you open the box and talk to the drivers, they literally can't do anything. If I wrenched my parcel out the driver's hands before they have a chance to bloop it, it has not been delivered.
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Jan 12, 2023 13:06
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Christ I’m glad I work at a company small enough that my targets are basically just a general to-do list that three of us agreed on and wrote down as a reference
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Jan 12, 2023 13:18
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Wachter posted:where even if you open the box and talk to the drivers, they literally can't do anything. If I wrenched my parcel out the driver's hands before they have a chance to bloop it, it has not been delivered. This really pissed me off once when I had left my house, locked my door, got my dog and wife into the car and began to set off when I saw the DPD driver arriving with a parcel for me. I went to him to take it but he would not let me have it and put it into my car until he'd got me to go back, unlock my door, then let him take a picture of it half-in-half-out of my front door. loving ridiculous. TACD posted:Christ I’m glad I work at a company small enough that my targets are basically just a general to-do list that three of us agreed on and wrote down as a reference And I'm glad I work in a job where it's nearly loving impossible to reduce what I do to something measurable beyond asking my colleagues "what do you think of Sir Sidney Poitier".
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Jan 12, 2023 13:19
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HopperUK posted:It's at @Pharmcheckersc1 Fantastic. I predict that nothing at all will happen to the senior Well staff named, and the lad who wrote the letter will get struck off or suspended. Or it will all just be ignored. And there's still people out there wondering why you shouldn't use your real name on the internet. I haven't worked for Well in over 7 years. The last shift I did I had to single handedly dispense 36 methadone doses. gently caress that and gently caress them.
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Jan 12, 2023 13:19
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Gives me a lot more time for my own problems caused by deciding I need to refactor half the application six months in 
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Jan 12, 2023 13:19
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Tesseraction posted:His hair was short; he would have used a comb.
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Jan 12, 2023 13:21
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Gambrinus posted:
I cannot possibly comment on the *specific* allegations in the letter but I can say that I'm not a bit skeptical of any of it, and I wish whoever wrote that hadn't indulged in the defamation and name-calling because I think it dlilutes the larger point and makes it a lot easier for the company to ignore. I dunno if the outside agencies will ignore the fraud allegations.
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Jan 12, 2023 13:33
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I got a Steam Deck delivered by Evri just before Christmas - got a picture of the box sitting on the pavement outside my house and couldn't get home for another five hours. Thankfully no-one had pinched it but jeeeeeez.
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Jan 12, 2023 13:43
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Sir Sidney Poitier posted:This really pissed me off once when I had left my house, locked my door, got my dog and wife into the car and began to set off when I saw the DPD driver arriving with a parcel for me. I went to him to take it but he would not let me have it and put it into my car until he'd got me to go back, unlock my door, then let him take a picture of it half-in-half-out of my front door. loving ridiculous. Annoying but this simple thing protects you and the driver. It stops the driver stealing it or winging it in the bushes if it cant find your place. And it stops you from claiming it never arrived. Or if someone knew your parcel was being delivered and hung outside and pretended to be you. All this high tech GPS poo poo it does, to get your Sex Arse from 12000 miles away, and it still can't prove you got it without a pic or a signature.
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Jan 12, 2023 13:47
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Guavanaut posted:I wonder which weirdo has Hitler's combs Right wing foot guy with a collection of hitlers shoes.
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Jan 12, 2023 13:53
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happyhippy posted:Annoying but this simple thing protects you and the driver. I've had several times when they delivered it in front of another building and took a picture of that front door - once even on a completely different street, that was a good one. About half the time it was gone when I went there. I've had them give me money back once but usually they just refuse to do anything. e: Also technically the driver could just take a photo and then nick it after if he wants and there's no cameras. Private Speech fucked around with this message at 14:02 on Jan 12, 2023 |
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Jan 12, 2023 13:58
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Rustybear posted:this is not the hill i want to die on but... having *badly defined* KPI's means you game them. The average David Brent-style middle manager has an intellect at least 3 orders of magnitude greater than what GPT-3 and 5 million quid of cloud compute power will get you. That capability would not have evolved if it turns out a trivial calculation based on 2 to 3 metrics could do better.
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