T.J. acutely comments on my friend's example of measurement,
> > It wasn't that I
> > couldn't measure what was good and what was crap, just that there's no
> > time to directly observe and measure that kind of performance.
>
> There is another route and it involves greater participation by those
> people who are responsible for the tasks. Were they involved in the design
> of their own work? Were they fully enrolled in some vision for their
> group, for the company as a whole? I wonder because much of what the
> author said about measurement was very useful and yet this possibility -
> gaining more data by doing more participative job design - was not
> broached in the post. Additionally, this element of asking people what
> they should be doing and how they should do it includes geting them to
> commit to what the key performance indicators will be if all goes well.
(I'm in a hurry, I have a flight to catch, but I want to comment on this
now because I'll forget when I get back.)
T.J. let me just say, up front, that your note really struck a raw nerve.
If I sound angry or upset, it is at the situation that my friend was
describing, not at you.
The people who were filling our database with "noise," were, let's see,
unmotivated and incompetent people. Harsh words that describe a terible
reality. I was quality manager at the time the new measurement came out,
and the database began to be filled with noise. This was a problem I
wrestled with intimately.
Let me tell you what I did, both in interacting with the managers and with
the people themselves.
First, I felt like the biggest problem we faced was that these people (I'd
say 20% of the people in the department) just showed up to work to earn
money. This feeling, sadly, was confirmed through many face to face
conversations with these people. They didn't care about Novell, and found
computer technology to be boring and laborious work. When I asked them why
they came to work, with these feelings, they simply said, "It pays well.
That's it."
Second, there was no fundamental purpose to Novell's existence other than
to make a profit. While the business Novell is in is rich in possible
purposes, the company could only focus on one thing: Money. This had a
rather demeaning affect on those of us who worked there, as we felt like
we were nothing more than pawns on a chess board, to be moved about my
mgmt. as they pleased. There were a few of us who found meaning and
purpose in our work, and we more or less self-organized into coherent
teams and were able, as a result, to achieve some pretty amazing results.
However we were a threat to the 20% who were just screwing around, and
they were very vocal about how there was an elitist group who governed the
department. This was one of the contributing factors to so many of us
being laid off. Novell rewarded mediocrity and punished excellence. .
.mmmm. . .I'm not going to use foul language, I'm not going to get upset.
. .deep breaths, really deep breaths. . .
Third, management couldn't see how they were rewarding mediocrity and
punishing excellence. And the results speak for themselves: Over 40% of
the employees in my department now work for Microsoft. Guess who still
works at Novell? The mediocre ones. Good. They got what they deserved.
Fourth, when I would talk about searching for a purpose that transcended
profits and that was centered in a few lasting values I got a hostile
reaction. One of the mngrs. was a retired Army Col. -- a real son of a
bitch! He would come into my office and yell and scream and fuss at me:
"Goddamit Ben! Why the hell do you have to make everything so damn
esoteric! A business is in business to make money. That's it! And if you
don't stop saying otherwise, your going to get your balls ripped off by a
bunch of pissed off managers." (That was a mild conversation. There were
many others that would make a sailor blush. . .he was right. . .I took a
stand for what I thought would help the company on a number of important
issues, and, in the end, I got my balls ripped off!)
Fifth, all the managers cared about was that the numbers looked good for
QBR (Quarterly Business Review). The VP set a goal that 75% of all calls
would have a documented solution published in our problem database. The
only thing he measured, however, was how many incidents had a document
attached. What type of document didn't matter. So the line managers got
together with a bunch of whimpy employees and said, "Hey, let's create a
standard document that says, 'The customer didn't read the manual, and the
answer was in the manual.'" And so they did. And they reached their 75%
target, which meant absolutely nothing except that they looked good in
QBR. Boy did the shit hit the fan when I wrote a Corrective Action
against that procedure. . .
I hope that puts some context to what my friend was talking about.
-- Benjamin B. Compton bcompton@enol.comLearning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>