Comments on: 5 Ways Companies Breed Incompetence

By: Still Gainfully employed

Still Gainfully employed — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 02:50:34 +0000

Not my experience at all. I read this as nonsense.

By: Barack Obama

Barack Obama — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 04:32:10 +0000

Oh yes we kan

By: Robert Morris

Robert Morris — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 19:18:05 +0000

Any metric – good, bad, or indifferent – will give rise to workarounds. The question is the metric encouraging useful behavior or not, workarounds included. In this case, it was determined that the most successful people made 14 calls a day, and that allowed them to make sales targets. The real metric is sales, not calls. Not doing the calls and not making sales = firing. Making sales and not doing calls = promotion.

And if the effect of the metric is known before it’s implemented, then the implementer is wasted developing and implementing metrics, as they are smarter than the entire population using the metric.

By: WC

WC — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 15:40:28 +0000

The first point is less about breeding incompetence and more about poor oversight. If management themselves were competent enough they would either hire a think tank or become a think tank themselves to put measures in place which could prevent the workaround. Loopholes in protocal are not ways to breed incompetence, but rather poor planning on the part of management to put steps in place to accurately reflect performance. This is by far one of the most effective ways organizations become inefficient because their procedures are either too clustered and have alot of wasteful steps which can be bypassed, or they fail to put in a system which can accurately measure the specific quantity they desire.

By: Doug Waltman

Doug Waltman — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 06:41:23 +0000

I had experience being the employee stretched too thin about a year or so ago. Not only does it decrease performance, but it also lowers morale. For me it almost ended up in resignation. However, open communication with my employer provided an opportunity to have my environment and work responsibilities changed. The result? Increased performance through synergy with other employees. And I’m much happier now for it.

By: PSINET

PSINET — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 03:41:54 +0000

“Nobody wanted to go on probation, so a workaround surfaced. On slow days, team members would enter fake conversation notes into the database that managers checked at the end of each business day. These fake notes were usually inconsequential (”Said he wasn’t interested,” etc.), but the point is that people entered a load of crap into the company’s database in order to save their own hides. Those daily quotas encouraged cheating, and harmed the company, too.”

This is how a once great ISP used to measure sales rep performance. The sales reps decided to use this workaround.

By: jankins

jankins — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 01:50:43 +0000

ofcourse it does but before we do that we need to give them their right “stop extorting the worker” 99problmes http://tinyurl.com/cyhssj

By: blah

blah — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 01:47:38 +0000

You should probably not criticise kids not knowing how to spell in the same sentence as “supercede”.

By: tim the richard

tim the richard — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 01:18:18 +0000

I’m proud to operate my company this way. It encourages all employees to be just like me. Just what I’ve always wanted.