Malicious Compliance
Jan. 29th, 2023 11:07 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
plonqAfter reading a post in the sub-Reddit bearing the same name as the title of this post, I was reminded of something that happened before I retired the first time.
I was sitting at my desk engaging in my usual activity of counting down months, days, hour and minutes until retirement when a co-worker who was engaged in similar activities came over to our building to ask me for help. He worked in the unionised part of the office, and they'd been coming under tighter scrutiny of late as management cranked up their adversarial leadership style to 11.
He was one of the most senior and experience workers in his group, having forgotten more about how the business ran than the people managing in were likely to ever learn. Because of his knowledge and experience, he was usually the one given work that was too complicated and problematic to task with the less experienced employees. I'd known this guy for years, and he was a conscientious, hard-working person who took pride in doing a good job.
So he was understandably upset when his (comparatively new) manager started giving him grief over having low productivity compared to the rest of the group. He tried to explain that his output only looked lower than the others because the work he was doing often required a lot more investigation since he was handling the especially complicated tasks. His manager simply said that her numbers did not back up his claims of being a productive worker, and she went as far as to threaten an investigation and demerits. She represented the new style of management that was taking root in the company, and an example of the growing toxicity that encouraged a lot of us to retire early.
His purpose in coming to me was to ask if I had any insight into how they were tracking productivity. I admit that I was also curious as to why they'd be coming after inarguably the best employee in their department for his numbers, so I did some digging. After a couple minutes of sleuthing, I found the dashboard where they had the productivity numbers ... and I was appalled. I told what they were tracking, and he was also taken aback.
"I've worked here for a very long time, and this is one of the stupidest things I've ever heard."
"Welcome to the new style of management," I said.
To boil it down to its simplest terms, they were effectively measuring productivity by the number of transactions a user submitted. They didn't look at the complexity of the transactions, or the volume handled by a single transaction, just the number of times that the person hit "enter". Not that it was my place to tell a person how to game the system, I dropped a couple of hints that he took to heart.
When he went back to his desk, he started breaking down his job into smaller pieces. Rather than handling 150 things in a single transaction, he would handle fifteen of them, then sip his coffee and work on a crossword puzzle for a couple of minutes until his next action would be counted as a new transaction. When they processed the productivity numbers the next week, he'd gone from the bottom of the pack to their most "productive" employee by a large margin. Sadly, the message that his manager took away from it was that her threat of demerits was all that it took to make him work harder.
The irony was that he was working far less. He confided in me after that the experience had made him care far less about doing a good job, and more focused on how close he was to retirement. He just couldn't bring himself to care any more about doing a good job for such stupid and petty management.
I guess the moral of this story is to be careful who you promote, because you typically get the product that you deserve. Bad managers will produce bad results.
I was sitting at my desk engaging in my usual activity of counting down months, days, hour and minutes until retirement when a co-worker who was engaged in similar activities came over to our building to ask me for help. He worked in the unionised part of the office, and they'd been coming under tighter scrutiny of late as management cranked up their adversarial leadership style to 11.
He was one of the most senior and experience workers in his group, having forgotten more about how the business ran than the people managing in were likely to ever learn. Because of his knowledge and experience, he was usually the one given work that was too complicated and problematic to task with the less experienced employees. I'd known this guy for years, and he was a conscientious, hard-working person who took pride in doing a good job.
So he was understandably upset when his (comparatively new) manager started giving him grief over having low productivity compared to the rest of the group. He tried to explain that his output only looked lower than the others because the work he was doing often required a lot more investigation since he was handling the especially complicated tasks. His manager simply said that her numbers did not back up his claims of being a productive worker, and she went as far as to threaten an investigation and demerits. She represented the new style of management that was taking root in the company, and an example of the growing toxicity that encouraged a lot of us to retire early.
His purpose in coming to me was to ask if I had any insight into how they were tracking productivity. I admit that I was also curious as to why they'd be coming after inarguably the best employee in their department for his numbers, so I did some digging. After a couple minutes of sleuthing, I found the dashboard where they had the productivity numbers ... and I was appalled. I told what they were tracking, and he was also taken aback.
"I've worked here for a very long time, and this is one of the stupidest things I've ever heard."
"Welcome to the new style of management," I said.
To boil it down to its simplest terms, they were effectively measuring productivity by the number of transactions a user submitted. They didn't look at the complexity of the transactions, or the volume handled by a single transaction, just the number of times that the person hit "enter". Not that it was my place to tell a person how to game the system, I dropped a couple of hints that he took to heart.
When he went back to his desk, he started breaking down his job into smaller pieces. Rather than handling 150 things in a single transaction, he would handle fifteen of them, then sip his coffee and work on a crossword puzzle for a couple of minutes until his next action would be counted as a new transaction. When they processed the productivity numbers the next week, he'd gone from the bottom of the pack to their most "productive" employee by a large margin. Sadly, the message that his manager took away from it was that her threat of demerits was all that it took to make him work harder.
The irony was that he was working far less. He confided in me after that the experience had made him care far less about doing a good job, and more focused on how close he was to retirement. He just couldn't bring himself to care any more about doing a good job for such stupid and petty management.
I guess the moral of this story is to be careful who you promote, because you typically get the product that you deserve. Bad managers will produce bad results.
